


The Game's Afoot

by Slybrarian



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Nobilis - R. Sean Borgstrom
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Fanboy, Gen, M/M, Mary Sue Big Bang, Video & Computer Games
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2015-11-10
Packaged: 2018-04-30 08:34:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5157152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slybrarian/pseuds/Slybrarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carl is an average postdoc at a midwestern university, beavering away at his research and hoping Tony Stark's murderous robot mishap doesn't result in his funding getting cut. Then he is gifted with phenomenal cosmic power, turning him into… ah… look, he's not good at super-names, okay? He'll come up with one eventually. In any case, he soon finds himself with a nemesis plotting to remake the world, and must work with the Avengers to save the planet, hopefully without making a fool of himself in front of Captain America.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Game's Afoot

Enlightenment came in the form of a football.

An American football, to be specific, not the kind used in soccer. It was an old one, passed from hand to hand and person to person from semester to semester, until it reached the point where it was quite elderly in football-years. Perhaps its worn faux-pigskin exterior and malformed shape was why it went spinning off-course instead of adhering to the perfect arc of a pass. Perhaps it had more to do with the thrower, who'd had entirely too much cheap beer the previous day and not nearly enough sleep. Perhaps it was simply destiny. 

Whatever the case, instead of stopping in a frat boy's hands, it went whizzing through the air and smacked a passerby upside the head. 

Carl Hasser found himself staring up into the morning sky. It was a beautiful day, the sky perfectly clear and turning from dawn reds and pinks to a blue that seemed endlessly deep. The last stars were still just visible. Or was that a planet? Yes, in that direction it might well be Eärendil, the Morning Star. It was a stunning reminder of what lurked just out of sight, obscured by the very sky itself, or by his mere human eye's inability to pick out the vast array of planets and stars that shown above due to the atmospheric scattering of the sun's rays. Countless stars - billions and billions! - in the Milky Way, a statistically large part of them with planets. Billions upon billions of galaxies. Countless places where the life humans now knew existed out there might be thriving, all there but hidden from sight.

And so too it was up close. What appeared solid was just a macroscopic conglomeration of microscopic molecules, themselves little more than empty space between chemically-bonded atoms, which were themselves just the result of interacting forces! It was turtles all the way down. Even at the human level so much of what his senses told him was merely a quick and dirty fudge created by the sensory areas of the brain and interpreted by higher functions that spent a great deal of time lying to themselves. The whole of creation was so grand and yet so much more was hidden behind the illusion that was mere physical reality, just beyond the reach of his tiny mortal --

The thought was interrupted by the appearance of a dudebro's head blocking out his view. "Wow, are you okay, brah? I am so sorry!"

There were times when Carl seriously wondered why he had not taken that quant job with Goldman-Sachs instead of joining a research startup. His soul seemed like a small price to pay to escape frat boys. No, wait, he remembered - the banks were all full of bros as well. 

"I'm fine," Carl grumbled, pulling himself from the ground. He was a beefy young man, heavyset despite regular exercise and just slightly above average height. His thick brown hair was cut fairly short and not styled at all beyond some basic combing to keep it straight. He wore a plain navy button-up shirt and khakis, both spotted now with bits of dirt and grass. He tried to brush to the worst of it off. At least the campus wasn't currently a mud-covered swampscape like it had been most of the excessively rainy summer. Otherwise he'd be soaked and slimy from head to toe. He picked up the bag he'd been carrying and was pleased to see that despite his tumble the styrofoam-packed breakfasts hadn't spilled everywhere.

"You sure, brah? You look kinda wobbly there. I can get you something to drink and dull the pain a bit."

"No, thanks," Carl said hurriedly. He'd made it through university and grad school with his brain intact by avoiding what passed for alcohol in a college town; he wasn't about to drink any while possibly concussed. "Just watch where you're throwing that thing, okay?"

"Sure thing, brah," frat boy said, before hustling back to his game of catch. 

 

Carl went back to trudging his way back to the research park, dodging texting pedestrians, maniac cyclers, and drivers unfamiliar with the concept of 'right of way'. He varied between cursing whoever had decided to put the high-tech industry-university partnership complex so far from the good restaurants and trying to pick up his train of thought. He'd been pondering a particularly tricky bit of coding that he'd been stuck on for a while, related to database design, and felt like he'd been on the verge of a breakthrough before being so rudely interrupted. Whatever it was, it was gone now. Maybe once he'd had some chow and an asprin it'd come back to him.

He reached the building housing his workplace, Panoply Applied Technologies. It was, in essence, an unusually pretty strip mall full of high-tech workplaces, although not quite as bleeding edge as the ones at the even newer Stark-funded research park just finished on the north side of campus. Panoply had a suite at the end. The front third, near the windows and precious SAD-preventing sunlight, were the offices, conference room, and all-important break area. The rest was a workshop full of machine tools, rapid prototyping machines, 3D printers, and partly-assembled robots. 

"Chow's up!" Carl called out as he pushed through the front door. His colleagues came running like a pack of ravenous dogs. A very small pack - there were only two of them who were full-time, with their student interns gone for the summer. He lead them back to their break room.

Ronan Whelan was Panoply's lead programmer, and a long-time friend of Carl's. His build was in many ways opposite of Carl's, short and wiry, with ginger hair and a short, well-trimmed beard that he thought made him look more mature. His opposite number was Zara Subedah, the chief engineer. She was in jeans and a Carhart shirt, with her long black hair pulled neatly back into a bun. 

"Waffles and eggs for you, breakfast burrito monstrosity for you, and sweet, sweet pancakes for me," Carl said, handing out styrofoam containers. "Also I got some orange juice to be healthy… ish."

"I knew there was a reason we kept you around," Ronan said.

"I thought that was because I'm the one who actually studied human beings," Carl replied. It truth he was a little out of place. Ronan and Zara were both hardcore tech wizards, the sort you would expect to see in a startup. Carl, on the other hand, had been a history and political science double-major with an information science masters. While he was well versed in statistics and information architecture, in general his tech skills were more self-taught and amatuer. The average Silicon Valley company probably wouldn't have glanced twice at him.

Fortunately, Panoply's main focus was on household automation, and especially on creating an integrated 'butler' system that could interface with devices and appliances from different vendors. The closest anyone had come to something like that was Stark's famous Jarvis system, and needless to say he was not selling that even if anyone could afford the specialized hardware it ran on. Several major companies were working on it, but Panoply was hoping to get ahead of them by focusing on the core human interface and online agent. That needed someone already up to speed on the latest in social research. Google and the like could brute-force predictive algorithms using their huge data feeds, but those weren't exactly popular in the post-Insight world, and they were betting that a more nimble, personal system could beat them out. Or, at the very least, do something sufficiently novel for one of the giants to shower them with money to get the patents.

"What happened to your face?" Zara asked, pointing at her left temple.

"Idiot with a football," Carl grumbled. "Why, is there a bruise?"

"I would have guessed a baseball bat. There's a huge purple and blue splotch."

"Yeah," Ronan said around a mouthful of food, "and it's bulging too."

"Does it hurt?" Zara asked, reaching out toward Carl. He flinched back.

"Yes, it hurts!"

"Maybe you should go see a doctor."

"On our health insurance? Hah! You can haul me to the hospital if I pass out." Carl suspected she was grossly exaggerating. It had only been a football. "I'll take some asprin and put some ice on it, okay?"

"Hmmmm." Zara looked for a moment like she might argue, but let it go. Knowing her, if something did happen to him, she had some prototype medical droid thing in the back anyways. 

Carl wolfed down his delicious, buttery, syrupy pancakes and got up to rummage through the cabinets. He came up with a first aid kit and a bottle of asprin, then retrieved an ice pack from the fridge. He retreated to the restroom to examine his war wound. He was surprised to find that, if anything, his friends had been understating just how bad he looked. A space the size of his palm was turning weird colors, all swirls of purple, green, and blue, and there was a substantial goose egg forming. He gingerly prodded at it and yelp at the sudden burning sensation that flooded his head. He leaned close to the mirror and checked his pupils but they seemed okay. Then again he wasn't sure what concussed pupils even looked like. He shrugged and decided to just wing it. He downed a couple asprins and put the ice pack over his bump, more or less securing it in place with some loops of bandage. 

Carl walked back to the office. Ronan burst out laughing as soon as he entered. Carl ignored him and went to his desk. It was a fancy triple-monitor setup, backed by a powerful top-end workstation, but by far his favorite part was the super-ergonomic chair. While usually he tried to be as cheap as he could be with Panoply's funds, given their mostly grant-funded existence, he'd decided early on that if they were going to be sitting around coding all day they were going to do it in comfort. All-night homework and gaming sessions on hard wooden chairs from yard sales had taught him the importance of that. 

Carl cracked his knuckles and set about the task he had set himself for the day. A digital personal assistant had to be able to adapt and adjust itself to its owner, in order to both anticipate their needs and interact with them in a positive manner. Not doing so in an unhealthily enabling way was also an important target. There was a lot of data on how measure personality traits, but a lot of it was unreliable when you got down to the individual as opposed to mass level, so pre-set routines were as likely to generate annoyance as helpfulness. Carl was trying to figure out how to best create data processing routines and memory functions that could a new user profile on the fly, with or without external (and possibly expensive or biased) data sources. He thought he had an ingenious new way to incorporate neural networks to the problem, something he could sketch a pseudo-code outline of in a few hours. He'd have something ready to discuss with the team by lunch.

That was the plan, anyway. 

He tried to dig in and get some coding in, but his growing headache made it difficult to focus. Adding in some soothing music didn't help much either; if anything it just made the pounding in his head synchronize with the beat. After a while he switched to diagramming out flowcharts and network configurations, but after thirty minutes or so he started to go a bit cross-eyed. He gave up at all attempts at producing anything and settled in to read a stack of articles and papers that had been building up over the last few days. He found himself madly scribbling down notes, more so than usual, with entirely too many exclamation points to be healthy. After a while do that, he looked back over what he had so far and decided that maybe he wasn't in the best place to be actually absorbing any useful information. Certainly writing nothing but "NO NO NO" was unlikely to be helpful in the future.

With work clearly out of the question, Carl sighed and closed out those windows. For a brief moment, he considered actually going to the hospital. Instead, with visions of urgent care bills dancing in his head, he took some more asprin, raided the tub of ice cream in the fridge freezer, and fired up Minecraft. Mindlessly digging around, smacking monsters about, and constructing a grand fortress to put Mad Ludwig to shame were not precisely productive activities, but they were excellent stress relief, and if he kept dying and losing boatloads of valuables due to trivial mistakes, at least he was doing it with virtual gold instead of an actual grant application. 

"Holy shit, guys," Ronan suddenly said, not long before lunch. "Someone's bombing Latveria."

Carl paused mid-boss battle, swiveling around in his chair. "What." No one bombed Latveria. Latveria was a tiny island of terrifying calm in the vast sea of post-Soviet Balkan tension. No one screwed with a guy who could call himself 'Von Doom' and not get laughed out of a room. Not after what happened to that rogue Serbian army general, at any rate.

"Seriously, it's all over the news, check it out."

Carl got up and hurried around Ronan's desk. The first thing out of his mouth was, "That's not Latveria, you idiot, that's Sokovia. It's a completely different part of the Balkans." He peered closer at the tiny video BBC Worldwide had on its website. "Is that one of those rogue Stark robots that everyone's been talking about? Ultra?"

"Ultron, yes," Zara said, peering past him. "They do look right, but I'd heard there were only a dozen or so at that incident in Seoul."

"I think there's a thousand of the things now," Ronan said. "It sounds like the Avengers are there somewhere."

"They were there a few days ago, but I thought that was something about Hydra, not - wait, look at that," Zara said. She pointed at something small and red zipping across the sky, a flare of rocket exhaust trailing behind it. "That's got to be Iron Man, and all that lightning has to be Thor."

"But then who's that third one in the air?" Carl asked. He nudged Ronan's shoulder. "Find a better camera view."

Ronan started checking different sites, professional and otherwise. Finally they settled on one from further up the mountains around the city, hosted by a livestreamer pointing a camera out his window while cursing in a mix of Albanian, Russian, and English. It wasn't a perfect view, given the distance, but it was enough to show people rushing from the city center and occasional flashes of light from lasers or lightning. It quickly became apparent that something very odd was happening to the ground, with massive cracks opening up in a roughly circular area. 

"Is it just me, or is the city moving?" Ronan said.

It seemed to be. A huge chunk of earth, maybe a mile wide and roughly hemispherical, was lifting ponderously into the aid. Carl took one look at it, thought about possible reasons to even try to move something that huge, and quickly hit on one that a homicidal robot might aim for. "We are all going to die."

"Hey, no, wait, there's your man-crush… going off the side…" Ronan said, pointing at a tiny blue figure falling from what used to be a bridge. "Nope, he's back up again. The Avengers will save the day."

"I don't know about that," Zara murmured, glancing at Carl. She was clearly thinking the same thing he was. "If they don't stop that thing soon and bring it back down gently, I'm not sure just destroying the robots will be enough. Dinosaur impact, here we come."

"It's not that big, relatively speaking, and it wouldn't be going anywhere near asteroid velocities, but still..." Carl said. He starting adding up figures in his head: approximate volume, density of stone, impact velocity from given heights, and came up with an answer somewhere between Krakatoa and Toba Event. Add in prevailing wind patterns and it wasn't a pretty picture. Europe would be in serious trouble at even a few thousand feet if it hit as one chunk. Dust would go east toward Asia and India, and while the physical damage would be minimal, the ecological effects would be disastrous. A crop failure in the most densely populated regions of the world would result in famine and war, along with a total collapse of the global trade system. Even areas like America, with excess farming capacity, and the global south, outside the spread of the dust cloud, would be hit by the knock-on effects. Spread that across several years with the worst case scenario and the death toll would be astronomical. 

They could watching the end of modern civilization on Twitch.tv and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it. It was New York all over again.

"I don't suppose your family has any extra bedrooms?" Zara asked, as the city-cum-doomsday device rose past the camera level, leaving them unable to observe the action but with an excellent view of the giant engines propelling the thing into the clear blue sky. 

"Yeah, the farm could probably use an extra mechanic," Carl replied. "We'll want to crate up the machine tools here first though…."

"Hey, guys, is that a helicarrier?" Ronan asked. "I thought those were all destroyed?"

"No, they never found the original," Carl started to say, only to stop, thoughts of imminent doom momentarily averted. "Is that Iron Patriot? Is Iron Patriot helping the Avengers? Oh my god, this is so cool."

"How can you even tell?" Zara asked. "He's all of five pixels long."

"I wonder if the Falcon is there too…" He tried to spot any other flying figures but distance had grown to the point where it was impossible to make out anything smaller than the helicarrier with any clarity. It only got worse as the entire rock disappeared through the cloud layer and left them with nothing to watch. 

Minutes passed, until there was a sudden echoing boom. Bits of rock started to fall through the clouds, but nothing that seemed larger than a person at most. The debris was horribly dangerous if you happened to be under it when it hit, but not a threat even to the city overall. It wasn't long before the BBC began reporting the that doomsday device had been safely disintegrated mid-air and that most of the population appeared safe due to early warning and evacuation efforts by the Avengers and whoever was in charge of the carrier. Cleanup would undoubtedly take months or years, and that crater wasn't going anywhere, but all things considered both the city and the world had gotten off fairly lightly. 

"I told you the Avengers had it handled," Ronan said. 

"No farm life for us, it seems," Zara said.

"At least not until the next maniac tries something like this," Carl said darkly. Chitauri, Svartelfs, Ultron… three near-apocalypses three years in a row. Four, if you counted Insight, which seemed reasonable. Add in the rapidly growing number of super-powered maniacs who were coming out of the woodwork without SHIELD to keep them in check and the long-term health of civilization wasn't looking too good.

Carl remained largely morose and grumpy the rest of the day, in part because of a sudden onset of existential pessimism and in part because the pounding in his head had resumed with greater fervor now that the excitement was over. The only bright spot was when Steven Grant Rogers, aka Captain America, aka _People_ 's Hottest (Earthling) Man Alive, briefly appeared to speak to a hastily-assembled news team. He was sweaty, dirty, and bloody, in a ruggedly good-looking way. It wasn't even a real press conference, just a statement that the threat had been neutralized, that the original Avengers were alive but there had been a casualty among the mysterious new members, and that a longer statement would be given in a day or two when the authorities had been briefed and initial search and rescue was complete. Carl was left wondering how his hair could still be so perfect, a clear sign that he really needed to get some rest. 

Rest turned out to be a really horrible idea.

Carl was groggy by the time he got home early in the evening, having spent the intervening time switching between the news, chat, forums, and back again, but for the most part the pain in his head had subsided. The bruising was still weird colors, but his pupils seemed normal, which TV and the internet told him meant he didn't have a concussion. So, after taking a last few painkillers, he went to bed early to sleep it off. 

He woke up sometime in the night, only to experience that strange vertigo-like sensation that came with vivid dreaming. He was fairly certain that his bedroom was not outdoors either, certainly not on a hilltop surrounded by forest. Overhead auroras shimmered and wove through the moonless night sky. Behind them the stars were silently falling one by one. Carl was surprised to find he could move about freely, as his dreams were rarely lucid. At least, he thought so, but he rarely remembered his dreams either, so maybe it was a regular occurrence. He didn't know much about dreams. 

The sheets of aurora light began to twist and coil in on themselves, until they formed into a great serpent that slithered through the sky, a cosmic Chinese dragon hundreds of miles long. 

"Heeeelllllooooooo," the serpent said, a great basso rumble that vibrated through Carl's very being, Treebeard as voiced by Cate Blanchett. "Can you hear me, child?"

"Wow," Carl said, "this is seriously weird, even by my standards." Usually his memorable dreams involved him as a Jedi or starship captain. Or having to retake a class in high school because it turned out there had been a clerical error. Or, for a period when he had actually been in high school, Captain America as played by Matt Damon.

"This is no mere dream, young human, but an astral projection from beyond your world," the serpent told him. "I am Ialavanua, Imperatrix of Motion, Abstraction, and Games, serpent-guardian of the World Ash, and I bring you tidings of great import."

Carl waved at his dream-snake. "Nice to meet you." 

"Your world and those who live in it are in grave danger. If something is not done, all shall perish."

"You know, I was just thinking the same thing," Carl replied, "but then you are probably just my subconscious."

"You speak of the enemies that come from within, on your own planet or from your own galaxy. There are others. There is, was, and will be a war in the heavens, between the forces of Creation and the Riders of the Lands Beyond, who wish to unmake it." 

A diagram appeared in the sky, nine circles outlined in silvery starlight, one atop the other and enclosed in a sphere. "Your physical reality is composed of nine closely-tied dimensions, which are themselves part of a fractal multiverse." The diagram expanded, showing first a web of linked sphere, which formed a leaf-like structure, which was attached to a twig, a stick, a branch, and so on until a massive ash tree filled the sky, its canopy stretching from horizon to horizon. "And that multiverse is just one part of a greater whole that is the World Ash, which is the structure on which all worlds are formed."

"Right, the Foster Manifold," Carl said. "I saw that special on Neil Degrasse Tyson's show."

"There was a great battle, and injured Riders fled it across the Ash, to land upon your world," the serpent said, curling around the tree's trunk. "Earth is a gateway to rest of your universe, and it is no coincidence that the should settle upon your reality in particular. Your science and magic have only just begun to bloom, and it is undefended compared to others. They seek a foothold from which they can launch an attack upon reality."

"And I'm guessing I wouldn't like what they want."

"They wish to collapse all your myriad worlds into one single, 'pure' timeline," Ialavanua replied. "A cataclysm of untold proportion. You must stop it."

"Me." Carl wanted to laugh. "I think you need to ask someone else. I can't fight the, the Great Old Ones or whoever these guys are."

"I have sent you a weapon, a divine spark forged from my own essence and a shard of a fallen enemy. Even now it has bonded to your very soul," As she spoke something burned within Carl's chest. "How it will manifest, I cannot say for sure, but you soon you will wield miracles of great power, sufficient to drive the Enemy from your world."

"Okay, again, you've got the wrong guy," Carl said, starting to get seriously worried, even if this was just a really weird dream. Delusions of grandeur lead to things like building crazy killer robots. "Actually, there's this really awesome guy named Steve, who would be perfect. I'm just an ordinary guy."

"Rest assured, I was careful to find someone who was compatible with… hmmmm." Ialavanua leaned her head down and tilted it sidewise, until her pale red eye filled half the sky and seemed to pierce through him. "You are not female."

"No!"

"Ah. Ahem. Well, I was forced to act quickly, while the way was still open, and catapulting divine shards across trans-dimensional distances is not a precise art. You apparently were unusually receptive at the moment it arrived. No matter, it would not have bonded to your soul if you did not have the potential for greatness."

"That is not reassuring," Carl retorted. He did not want divine fire bonded to anything, much less his soul, and certainly not by accident. On the bright side, at least he had some sort of sky serpent mentor to help him out.

"Also," she added, sensing his thoughts, "I must confess that you are far from where I am, and that I cannot send assistance or communicate often."

Carl ran a hand through his hair. "This just gets better and better."

"My apologies." The auroras were beginning to fade and dissipate, and the serpent's voice dimmed into a distant echo. "The knowledge and skills you need should manifest soon enough. You have been given great power, beyond your wildest imagining. Do your best and it all should work out. And remember, if you fail, everything you know and everything you do not know will collapse into a singularity of unrealized potentiality. No pressure!"

The lights went out, leaving only the stars behind, and soon they too faded away along with the rest of the world. Carl was left standing there impatiently for what seemed like a minute or two, trapped in the dream equivalent of an empty chat room, until suddenly he conked out again. 

When he woke up again, he was in his own bed, at least mostly. The sheets were all on the ground and he was in danger of falling off, one leg hanging over the edge already, but at least it was the right room. Bright sunlight was shining through tiny gaps in the curtains where he hadn't managed to shut out the burning light of the daystar. His phone was buzzing madly on the nightstand as well, and after a few fumbles he managed to answer it. 

"Are you okay?" Zara demanded. "It's eleven o'clock. Where are you?"

"In bed," Carl mumbled. "Eleven? Really?"

"Yes! I thought you were dead."

"No, just sleepy. Sorry." Carl rolled out of bed and stumbled over to the bathroom, the light flipping on as he came in. He could hear quiet jazzy music playing somewhere; he must have left his computer on by accident. He squinted at himself in the mirror. "Huh."

"Huh, what?"

"Bruise is gone." He snapped a quick picture to prove it and sent it to her. "See, I told you I'd be fine."

"How do you feel?" 

"I feel fine," Carl said. He walked out into the living room. He owned a ranch-style house a few miles outside town, where the civilization around the university faded into corn fields and woods. It wasn't especially large, by the standards of McMansions, but it was more than enough for a bachelor. The big yard and second, detached garage more than offset the supposedly-limited floor space. His computer was on a desk in one corner of the living room, a previous-generation gaming machine with a big Stark Industries screen. It was completely dead and silent, leaving Carl wonder precisely why he seemed to be hearing what sounded like the Star Wars cantina band as interpreted by B.B. King.

"I should warn you," Zara said, "that you need to watch out for reporters. A couple have called here, they seem to be bothering everyone on campus even vaguely connected to AI or robotics."

"We're the biggest science and technology school in the region," Carl replied, "even the liberal arts students are connected to robots."

He looked around the room and spotted a book sitting on the dining table. It wasn't one he recognized, for all that he had an entire wall of the spare bedroom dedicated to shelving. It was slim, only a few centimeters thick, and bound in a simple black leather cover. The title was embossed in silver on the front: _User Manual: A Field Guide for Powers_.

"Carl?" Zara said. "Carl, can you hear?"

"Sorry," he said absently. "I think I may need to take a sick day after all. Call you later."

Maybe this was just a coincidence and, in his concussion-dazed state, he had unpacked a newly arrived roleplaying manual. One he didn't remember ordering, not even from some long-delayed Kickstarter in the distant past. Cautiously he picked it up and then jumped backward, startled by the sudden appearance of what could only be called a HUD around the edges of his vision. It looked like the sort of thing you'd see with a computer RPG, with four bars measuring points of something on the bottom, inventory slots in the upper-left, and a series of icons on the upper-right. The book was the first item in the inventory.

Very carefully, Carl closed the book and set it down on the table. The HUD in front of him conspicuously failed to disappear, although the book was removed from it. He left the room and it remained in place, although when he returned to the bathroom he couldn't see anything hovering in front of his face. He went back to the living room and picked up the book again, flipping past the chapter listing to the introduction. 

"Greetings, comrade! I am Juanita Mendoza Marquez, Duchess of Blades, and I have been asked to write a brief introduction to this guide. I regret that we can provide only the most general of instruction, for we cannot say how your powers will manifest, or indeed which estate will take hold with you. We expect this will take the form of something closely tied to your personality, perhaps based on recent experiences, long-held belief systems, or common activities."

"Oh god," Carl said to himself, looking at that HUD floating in his eyes and thinking about how much time he spent playing videos games, not just the day before but most of his life, "I gave myself useless game-themed powers. I'm going to die."

No, no, that was defeatist talk. It was entirely possible that any actual powers he had were unaffected, and this was just a useful metaphor for using them that his brain had conjured up. He kept reading. 

"In addition to your core powers, you may manifest extra Gifts or inhumanly enhanced mortal skills, and indeed guide how those form. Be careful, for once set it will take time and effort to learn more."

Well, Carl thought that sounded more useful than generic game powers. He looked around the room for something that was equally important to him as computers, one which might represent Motion. There was the Captain America replica shield he had won in that insane bidding war against his nemesis, Lola1918, but he was not exactly the Captain America type. Also, the idea of copying anything from Cap seemed vaguely sacrilegious. Next to it, though, hung the classic Star Wars movie poster. Now there was something that he knew entirely too much about.

"I suppose I could find worse role models," he told himself. And really, given how long he'd spent playing Knights of the Old Republic and TIE Fighter over the years, it'd fit in with the existing metaphor. 

An icon on his HUD blinked. He glanced in that direction and it opened up a menu labeled "Gifts." Several things were popping into being on a list: Telekinesis, Danger Sense, Superior Swordsman, Parkour!, Durant Skin, and a long line of more mundane abilities like programming. There seemed to be some 'slots' left and his resolutely refused to think of anything else in case he needed something actually, well.... useful. 

He skimmed through the first chapter, labeled "Laws of Your Nature", full of sections about the four classes of miracles, the nine discrete levels of power and effect, divine resistance to damage, and imbuing things with bits of his power. There were also a considerable number of footnotes with side commentary on things like Noble etiquette, cosmic law, and how hard it was to find quality dining in Hell. Much of that seemed very concretely defined and matched up point-for-point with parts of his HUD. The core of his reality-warping powered seemed to be divided between two areas, the physical and the spiritual, and those in turn divided between things that affected his estate - Video Games, god help him - and those that affected himself or thing around him. 

Before running off to declare himself the world's first real Jedi Knight, though, Carl would have to verify that he did, in fact, have superpowers. This could all be a concussion-induced delusion. Admittedly, he didn't think that traumatic brain injuries produced such clear and self-consistent imagery - or soundtracks in his head, which could get annoying fast, even if it had switched over to a quiet background track - but perception was a very strange thing. The brain was easily tricked into seeing all sorts of things, or for that matter into not seeing them. In the end, he decided that he had to trust himself at some point or otherwise he'd never stop worrying that everything he experienced was just a dream within another dream, or that the simulation hypothesis was correct, or some other 'turtles all the way down' illusion.

So, Telekinesis, a Lesser Creation of Motion. It seemed a very broad concept. Simple at first glance, sure, but when you started to factor in things like relativity and scale it turned complex quickly. Did things only metaphorically moved, like money or electricity, count? Best to start with something straightforward, he thought. 

Carl raised a hand and pointed toward a mug sitting on the kitchen counter. He imagined it moving, just a little, due to some invisible force. Not an actual force, like magnetism or gravity, but an assume-a-spherical-cow generic force, the sort you found in purely theoretical scenarios. Nothing happened for a moment, so he concentrated harder and pushed with the inner warmth deep inside his chest.

The mug wobbled.

"Holy shit, that worked," Carl breathed, a wide grin splitting his face. He reached out with his mind again and thought about an even stronger force acting on the cup, so that it would float into his hand. It shot off the table straight at him, clonked him on the head, and bounced off the wall, narrowly missing the dining room window and leaving a dent in the drywall. His belated attempt at dodging left him unbalanced and for the second time in two days he found himself on the ground. His personal soundtrack did a rimshot, and one of the health levels on his HUD blinked yellow at him in silent admonishment. 

"Okay," he said to himself, "let's not do that again." Boy Scout knife rules clearly needed to be in effect: point the telekinesis away from you, not toward you.

He needed to read the manual thoroughly and then approach his testing from a scientific standpoint. Also, he needed some help. While traditionally comic super-heroes hid their costumed identities from even their friends, that had always seemed like kind of a dick move to him, especially in a case like this. Science was a team sport, and more importantly he needed someone to call an ambulance if he managed to hurt himself even more.

A few hours later, after eating lunch and reading the manual cover-to-cover twice over, Carl picked up his phone and dialed Zara. 

"Heeey, listen," he said. "Could you guys close up shop early and come over?"

"Why?" she said suspiciously. "Are you lying paralyzed on the floor?"

"No, just need your help with something. Bring the high-speed camera. And some accelerometers. Oh, also a magnetic field detector, infrared and UV sensors, really any of those things you have to let robots see things."

"Why?"

"Just do it. Please. See ya in a bit." Click. Carl rubbed his hands in anticipation. 

Thirty minutes later, Ronan's car came rolling up his driveway. Carl was waiting on his front porch and waved as Ronan and Zara got out and walked his way. He lead off with the speech he had carefully prepared.

"I have superpowers," he said. Just getting to the point had seemed the best option and the least likely to get sidetracked. Before they could tell him he was nuts, or for that matter he could chicken out, he lifted a spare paving brick he'd found in the garage using the power of his mind.

"All right," Zara said after a moment, "so you're not brain damaged."

"So you can see that?" Carl asked, letting the brick drop with a thud. 

"I can."

"Yep, same here," Ronan agreed. "Although… when you think about it, you could be just imagining that we're here agreeing with you."

"Thank you, Ronan," Carl said with a sigh. 

"Or of course this could all be a simulation and -"

"Yes, I know, I already considered that!" Sometimes being friends with geeks who'd immediately jump to the same circular philosophical what-ifs could be annoying. 

"Right, then," Zara said. "Let's unpack the gear and get our science on."

Science turned out to be disappointingly free of answers, or at least ones that might be useful for a Nobel Prize. As far as they could tell, there was no mechanism for the powers he was displaying - things just happened, with near-instant speed. Maybe it was occurring at such a small scale that it was invisible to their instruments but they couldn't exactly stick Carl in the Large Hadron Collider. Practical effects were more measurable. He could easily keep something moving indefinitely, despite friction, or add or change an object's speed or direction. It took a small but noticeable effort to stop something completely, and oddly enough even more to transfer motion from one object to another instantly. That was for objects up to about the size of a car, without much regard to mass or size, and he seemed only able to do it for one or two things at at time. Anything he wasn't actively controlling quickly returned to normal physics. He also seemed to have a sudden increase in athletic abilities, although anything beyond what a average-level professional might do quickly drained his miraculous batteries.

"You know," Carl said, "I've been meaning to get rid of that dead tree in the back yard, but I can't be bothered to spend the money to get it pulled down."

"Okay, let's set up for that," Zara said, aiming the high-speed camera they were using to film everything and calculate speeds at the tree in question. It was an old oak tree that had been dead for years, even before Carl moved in, and now was mostly just a trunk. It was far enough from any structures that he hadn't been concerned about it falling on anything, but it was still kind of ugly to look at.

"Test twenty-four, Zara said. "Attempt to impart maximum velocity onto a target. Begin when ready."

Carl took a deep breath, focused on the tree, and thought about it moving upwards as fast as possible. He expected it to tear itself free from the ground but not too quickly, given it was a good twenty feet tall. Instead it did an admirable impression of a rocket, there one moment and in the sky the next, disappearing from sight inside a second. Dirt torn up by the roots showered down around them. The effort left Carl feeling exhausted, like he'd pushed some invisible muscle to the limit and it was on the verge of quitting entirely. 

"Maybe that wasn't our brightest idea," Carl admitted. He was pretty sure - absolutely sure, really, because he could still feel the thing zipping along - that he'd just catapulted a tree to escape velocity. He really hoped it didn't show up on radar.

"I had nothing to do with this," Ronan said. "In fact, I don't even know you."

"At least you can be sure NASA would offer you a job," Zara said. 

"No way, I am not getting the government involved anytime soon," Carl said. "The last thing I need is to be locked up in some secret lab or kidnapped by whoever took over for SHIELD."

Testing his other, supposedly main powers was less helpful and more mind-boggling. He could boost his physical and mental abilities using "Aspect" miracles, but getting above the hobbyist level drained power. "Domain" supposedly controlled the physical nature of his Estate, but it appeared he had little free skill in that area, and about all he could do was cause ghostly images of a Koopa Troop appear in the air, and then with effort cause a classic Nintendo pop into existence. What, other than rampant game piracy, was that supposed to be good for? "Persona", one of his best skills, supposedly let him enchant himself or other things to be like a video game, but as far as he could tell that just made objects pixelated. And finally, "Treasure" let him imbue power into objects, places, or maybe even people - but only if he had some kind of close bond to them. 

The entire thing was immensely aggravating, really. Carl had been promised phenomenal cosmic power. Instead he got a dud. Not that he could complain about telekinesis, but it was a bit of a letdown after the build-up, especially since he still couldn't explain why the hell he now had a personal soundtrack. 

"We definitely need to keep experimenting, in a proper lab environment," Zara said once they'd run out of idea for the day and sat down for a pizza. "In fact, it might be best if you just avoid using these powers anywhere someone might see you. For that matter, maybe you should just, say... cancel your vacation."

"Whoa, hold on now," Carl said, holding up his hands. "I'm not saying I'm going to go out and beat up poor people like I'm Batman. But have you seen how much time I've been on that costume in the garage? No way am I missing Gencon."

"Missing one year won't hurt you," Zara said, quite reasonably.

"Missing the first year I can actually afford to cosplay as something other than a guy in a hoodie would. I'm pretty sure I could win contest."

"Dude," Ronan said, "I hate to say it, but we've all pretty much been humoring you about how good it looks. Don't get me wrong, it's decent for a first shot, but the stitching, well, it's a bit ragged."

"Hey! It looks fine," Carl protested. The plastic and metal parts that he'd been able to make using a CNC machine did, anyway. His attempt at a cape, perhaps not so much. "And maybe I can just use my newfound divine powers to make it even better."

Zara frowned. "I'm not sure that would ethical."

Carl groaned, although she was completely right. Still. He might be super-powered, but he refused to let that ruin what passed for his social life and vacation time. "I'll be completely discrete."

"Okay, I won't argue with you. It's a gaming convention, in one of the most boring cities in the country. What's the worst that thing can happen?"

"The International Space Station has exploded after being hit by a tree," Ronan suggested, "and any minute the Avengers are going to show up to arrest him. No, wait, being put into handcuffs by Cap is the best-case scenario, isn't it?"

Very carefully, Carl lifted Ronan's glass of pop into the air, floated it above him, and turned it upside down. 

Later that evening, once the others had gone home, Carl ventured out to the barn. Since he didn't have extra vehicles to store, beyond his cranky old riding mower, he'd set up a small workshop for DIY projects such as custom computers and wargame miniatures. His last attempt at a new hobby, building and flying a model helicopter, had quite literally crashed and burned, so at the moment the work table was taken up with bits and pieces of his attempt at cosplay.

There were two bits to it. The first was the costume, a set of Old Republic-era Jedi armor. When he'd first started it had been intended to make an N7 suit, but after the release the first trailer for the new Star Wars movie he'd changed his mind. The base layer was essentially padded sports gear, but he had created thin metal pauldrons, bracers, and shin guards to go over it. He'd tried adding a cape with the Jedi logo, but thus far it'd proven ugly and awkward at best. So had trying to put the pieces together into form that could be worn over tight clothing; the pieces of plastic and thin aluminum had all be carefully planned and machine-cut, but the final fitting was harder than he'd anticipated. Chaffing, chaffing everywhere.

It was still better than his attempt at sewing a Jedi robe, though. He had to admit that his friends were on to something about the stitching.

Second, and much more important, was the lightsaber. That had gone surprisingly smoothly so far. There was a large and well-developed online community for building replicas with full lights, sound, and sufficient sturdiness to duel with. Creating custom parts with a lathe and CNC machine had been easy enough, as had been selecting and putting together the internal electronics. All it needed was the final detailing and etching on the outer case, and he would have a decent-looking first attempt.

Now, however, he was thinking he could make it all a little more impressive. Zara was right, using magic to win contest would not be ethical, but there was no reason he couldn't look his best. So, with a bench full of tools, a mug of hot cocoa, and some cheerful swing in his ear, he set to work.

Carl labored feverishly through the night, until he finally conked out on the ratty couch he kept in the garage for just such late-night work sessions. When he woke up again, he had an intricately painted and carefully weathered set of armor, and a gleaming new replica lightsaber. It was about a foot long, with rubberized grips around the midsection for his hands. There were detailed brass inlays to give it more character and just above the grip was small window looking in on a small aquamarine-like crystal. A circular power switch and few other discrete buttons rounded it out. Wanting to test the light and sound, he turned it on. A brilliant yard-long beam appeared, blue verging on indigo.

"Wait, what," Carl said. He pressed the switch again and the beam disappeared. On. Off. On. That was definitely a real lightsaber beam, complete with an electric hum. Even by his standards, that seemed a bit absurd, and yet there it was. He tried spinning it around a few times and promptly sliced his work table in half, spilling tools and metal shavings everywhere. Clearly some practice was in order unless he wanted to slice himself into bits. Pressing a couple of the auxiliary switches confirmed that a lifetime of gun safety lectures had paid off and there was a safety mode, just a little too late to save his table.

Disaster was averted when he used his pixel-power on the two sections, whacked them with a hammer a few times, and 'crafted' it back together. The very act of doing so was an incredible insult to everything Carl had ever learned about science, technology, and actual craftsmanship. It was also incredibly cheap compared to buying a new one, and he hadn't made it through grad school without putting practicality ahead of sentiment or good taste.

Carl strutted into the office with a grin on his face, fully intending to show off his new toy. Instead he discovered they had a visitor, a bland, balding little man who was basically the platonic ideal of a generic bureaucrat. Carl vaguely recognized him as a member of the university's increasingly-bloated administrative layer. 

"Good morning, Carl," Zara said, standing beside the guy. Her expression was unnaturally still and calm, like the quiet moment just before a twister dropped on your head. "This is Deputy Assistant Dean Colbert, from the Office of Private Partnership Promotion."

"Nice to meet you, Mr. Hassler," Colbert said, shaking his hand vigorously. "First off, I want say how impressed and excited I am by what Dr. Subedah has just been showing me. This sort of high-quality research and development is exactly the sort of thing that attracts investors, students, and educators to our university. Entrepreneurs like yourself show how successful our partnership drive can be."

"Thank you, and it's actually Hasser," Carl said cautiously. Random deans showing up in research labs was never a good sign, even with deans who were actual academics and not political flunkies of former governors still looking to upgrade from university president to United States president. "We're very glad that the university can support us."

"Now, with all that said, we have run into a small hitch. Due to recent events, there's considerable scrutiny over certain areas of research, such as artificial intelligence and autonomous robotics. The university has decided to suspend all activity in those areas until new federal guidelines are in place."

"Well, that's too bad for the guys over the computer cognition lab, but… wait, do you mean us?"

Zara nodded. "They're shutting us down."

"But we don't do anything like sapient AI, it's just a fancy personal assistant with some housekeeping robots," Carl protested. 

Colbert nodded and smiled. It was so fake he might have well been a Mr. Potato Head. "Well, in that case, once the review committee is up and running in a few weeks I'm sure there will be no issue at all."

"Okay, but," Carl said, before pausing to let his thoughts catch up before his mouth said something stupid. A dialog wheel popped up in the lower-center part of his vision, right where his nose was, and he almost went cross-eyed looking at it. Given that one option was, 'you will rue this day, mortal!' he decided to ignore it for the moment. Trying to explain the technical differences between their system and an actual thinking machine was also out because it would bounce right off the man's skull. Instead he tried to appeal in terms a corporate weasel would understand.

"This is going to put us at a major competitive disadvantage," Carl argued. "Google, Facebook, Stark Industries, they aren't going to stop doing research. We need to keep up."

"I understand there may be federal regulations in the works for private entities in addition to institutions like ours that receive direct government funding."

He tried another tack. "What if we just rely on our outside money for now? Put the university share in escrow or whatever."

Colbert's plastic smile became a small plastic frown. "Unfortunately, since the university owns the building, I don't think that would be advisable. We would hate to cancel your lease."

"He has a point about the other money," Zara told him. "Our grants stipulate we have to use them or lose them, and if we can't show results our future revenue streams will dry up."

"I'm sure those bodies will be very understanding," Colbert replied. He'd clearly never filled out a grant application in his life, let alone interacting with a funding committee. They'd throw things out for a missing period. 

"How about the robotics?" Zara asked. "Can we continue the mechanical design? After all, that's just a matter of engineering, no computers involved at all. We can work purely by remote control."

"Well, ah, I'm not sure if that is covered or not," Colbert said. "You'll receive an email with the exact ban later today. I'm just making rounds as a courtesy to our partners."

Frustrated, and also a bit curious, Carl gave in and repeated, "What if we just rely on our outside money for now? Put the university share in escrow or whatever."

Colbert's plastic smile became a small plastic frown. "Unfortunately, since the university owns the building, I don't think that would be advisable. We would hate to cancel your lease." 

Interesting. However, before Carl could experiment further, Zara started guiding Colbert to the door. "Thank you for stopping by, Dean Colbert, we look forward to hearing from your office, have a nice day."

Carl waited until the door was safely shut, then raised a fist and shook it at the departing bureaucrat. "You can't cut funding! You will regret this!"

Zara pinched the brow of her nose and muttered something in Farsi. "No using mind tricks on college administrators."

"If it's good enough for Obi-Wan Kenobi," Carl replied primly, "it's good enough for me."

"Obi-Wan Kenobi is not a paragon of ethical choices." She sighed and shook her head. "Hopefully this will blow over quickly."

"It's a good thing I'm going on vacation anyway," Carl grumbled, "or I'd be seriously tempted to just start throwing magic around until the problem goes away. Maybe I could threaten to blow up the moon unless I'm paid… one million dollars!"

"There are sometimes," Zara said, "that I feel like I'm watching the world's weirdest supervillain origin story."

"Supervillain what now?" Ronan said, coming in the door. "Did Carl go dark side? I brought donuts, by the way."

Carl was already plotting how to move them all into his barn. He didn't trust the university, let alone the National Science Foundation or whoever ended up in charge of the no-more-killer-AI policy, to move quickly enough to save them all from penury. A little miraculous renovation, and maybe the addition of a secret underground lair with a hangar for a suitable aircraft to be built later, and they could have their own independent lab space. For that matter, his house could use a new roof that wouldn't cost thousands of dollars to put on. Maybe he'd use his unexpected time off to experiment with crafting and construction a bit.

Over the course of the next few weeks, he discovered a few important facts. First, he started to get a feel for the limits of what he could do with his powers for free and what took precious energy, which didn't always seem to recharge evenly or for noticeable reasons. There was also a hard limit of two miraculous abilities being used at any given time, including using his lightsaber as anything other than a fancy glow stick. Second, having crafting powers did not guarantee architectural brilliance or good taste, something that in retrospect should have been obvious given the haphazard nature of his constructions in games like Minecraft and Terraria. Third, while he could abstract an object into game form fairly easily, it took more miraculous oomph to reverse the process. He really hoped he could regain some juice before anyone visited, because it would be a bit hard to explain why his newly expanded garage appeared to be made out of cell-shaded cubes. Maybe it would wear off by itself sooner rather than later.

Carl didn't let a little thing like that stop his trip. He had been going to GenCon in Indianapolis for years, work, school, and budget permitting. Usually he drove to the city for just one weekend day, sometimes staying overnight with relatives to attend a second, but now that he was a Real Adult with a Real Salary, as opposed to a miserly student grant, he had splurged on a full four-day pass and a reasonably nice hotel room within walking distance. The fact that his job might evaporate from the capricious whims of the federal government and leave him with no money to pay his adult mortgage and student loans was irrelevant; never mind the fact that he was some sort of demigod now, he'd already paid for everything. 

Thursday and Friday flew by, a steady stream of events, panels, and gaming sessions interspersed with occasional breaks for sustenance and hygiene. Carl scrupulously avoided using any miraculous powers during the day, not just because of ethical qualms but because the last thing he wanted was turn games into super-games or start some kind of recursive meta-gaming loop. He did find, however, that he was able to stay bright-eyed and chipper far longer than usual. He'd lost the ability to power through all-night gaming sometime back in his mid-twenties, but now he was getting by fairly well with just the occasional power nap and lots of snacks. 

Still, there was only so much that even a guy who'd accidentally given himself super-gamer powers could take, so Saturday morning he escaped from the main convention center back to his hotel to do a little sight-seeing. There wasn't anything new at the downtown museums that he hadn't already seen, but he'd always enjoyed the zoo. If he timed things right he take a walk around it and catch a dolphin show without missing anything he cared about back at the convention. 

His first stop was his hotel; given the hot and humid weather, he wasn't going to inflict himself on the animals without a shower and a fresh deodorant application. The lobby was crowded, with more people arriving for the weekend days and several satellite events going on in the conference rooms, and while most of the traffic was coming down rather than up he had to fight his way against the flow of the teeming horde to reach an empty elevator right before it closed. Spotting a couple coming his way, he held the door open for them.

"Thanks," the man said. He was several inches taller than Carl and extremely muscular, to the point where the Captain America shield t-shirt he wore barely hid a thing, nor did his jeans for that matter. He had a baseball cap on as well, and thick-rimmed black glasses. Beside him was a thin brunette woman in a Next Generation shirt and shorts. Both were carrying suitcases.

"No problem," Carl said. "I'm Carl."

"Steve." He sounded like he was from somewhere in New England, although Carl couldn't say precisely where. "And this is Natalie. Nice outfit."

"Thanks. Here for the convention?"

"Something like that. We were in town anyways, thought we'd see some sights."

Carl nodded. He gestured toward the shield on Steve's shirt. "You a Cap fan?"

Steve shrugged. "More of a Barnes man, myself."

"You should check out the exhibit hall. There's a booth selling some cool Howling Commando memorabilia on the north side, and Cubicle 7 just put out a new World War Cthulu supplement that includes them," Carl suggested. "Or hit up the War Memorial Museum, they've got a little exhibit on Hoosiers in the 107th running right now."

"Really?" Steve replied. "We're doing a bit of museum-hopping anyways, we'll have to fit it in."

"Only after I get that Marina Sirtis autograph, honey," Natalie said, "and if you promise we can hit the mall afterward."

Steve rolled his eyes. "Yes, dear."

The elevator dinged open. "My floor," Carl said. "Have a fun time."

As the door closed, he heard Natalie saying, "I told you, it's all about the glasses -"

Carl was in his room briefly, just long enough to dump off the loot he seemed to keep accumulating despite the critical threat to his bank balance, shower, and to change into something a bit more comfortable and which wouldn't stand out quite as much walking about the streets. His costume and lightsaber he dumped into a mental inventory slot, leaving him in shorts and a plain green t-shirt. That done he returned to ground level and headed west. 

He walked at a leisurely pace, wanting to enjoy some fresh air and stretch his legs after being inside for so much time. It took him about twenty minutes to cross the busy downtown streets and reach the parkland around the riverside museums, and from there the footbridge crossing the downtown canal and the White River to the zoo. It was a beautiful day out, sunny yet not scorchingly hot as it so often was at the start of the summer. Bird were chirping, elephants were trumpeting in the distance, sirens were howling… well, it was downtown in a major city, you could only expect so much peace and quiet. 

Actually, there seemed to quite a lot of sirens, very close by. Pausing at the end of the bridge, Carl turned around just in time to see a gaggle of police cars come to a screeching halt in front of the state museum. Officers starting running inside, while people came streaming out the other direction. Something was going down in there. 

For a few moments, Carl was caught by indecision. On the one hand, as Captain Picard once said, "with great power comes great responsibility." He certainly had plenty of powers, and they could probably be useful in foiling a bank heist of shooting. On the other hand, he was in no way, shape, or form a trained first responder and would probably just get in the way, or worse get someone hurt by bumbling into a situation he didn't know anything about.

On the gripping hand, the police were now running _back_ out, pursued by what looked to be some sort of mechanical constructs, so maybe it was a super-hero kind of situation after all. They didn't seem to be killing anyone - yet - but it certainly wasn't appropriate museum behavior. Before his common sense could get the better of him, he took off running toward the museum's main entrance, curving to stay well clear of the canal it sat beside. While he did he changed from his street clothes to his cosplay armor with a thought, and switched his lightsaber from 'harmless' to 'kill'. 

As Carl approached, one of the little creatures appeared to spot him and turned his direction. It was a very odd little thing, like someone had taken an everyday metal trash receptacle, given it eight spindly little spider legs to move around on, a Dalek-style plunger arm, and a couple googly eyes. It waved the arm at him, the tip sparking with static. He didn't waste time over-thinking it, just swung his saber in its direction, and neatly cut it in half. There were no internals to it, other than a half-full trash bag, and after a moment the remains broke apart into a shower of clockwork bits and gold coins. A round table bristling with spines was bisected next. He was just starting to grin and think this would be easy when he heard an angry rustling sound behind him. He turned to find a potted fern on treads and had just enough time to be boggled by the absurdity. Then it slapped him with brass-coated leaves so hard that his plastic breastplate cracked and he flew a good half-dozen yards to land beside a police cruiser. He scrambled back on his hands and knees to hide behind it. A police sergeant was crouched behind it already, pistol drawn, and she didn't look terribly pleased to see him.

"Are you an Avenger or something?" the sergeant demanded. 

"Uh, no, not really," Carl admitted. "I just happened to be here for GenCon and thought I could help."

"Wonderful. That's really fucking wonderful."

"Look, just tell me what you want me to do. Leave, smash rogue furniture, whatever would work best for you."

She eyed the constructs gathered outside the entrance. There were maybe fifteen or sixteen things out on the yard now, mostly human sized or a bit smaller, each constructed around a random piece of museum furniture and bristling with various poking or shocking devices. They didn't seem to be advancing, just menacing anyone who tried to approach and occasionally popping sparks toward the police, but presumably the owner was around somewhere and might give them new orders at any time.

"Okay, here's what you'll do," the officer said. "Keep those things distracted and contained while we finish evacuating and wait for SWAT or the National Guard to arrive."

"Will do." Carl stood up and jumped over the car with ease. With a wave of his hand, he sent the evil fern sailing through the air, crushing itself and what appeared to be a sword-wielding stuffed mastodon into the museum wall. In perfect synchronicity, all the remaining constructs froze, slowly turned his way, and then began to chitter angrily. Distraction complete, apparently.

Carl hightailed it away from the police and into the big, open 'Farm Bureau Insurance Lawn' next to the museum. Hopefully Farm Bureau would be up for donating some more money to their lawn, because the landscaping was rapidly becoming scarred, charred, and covered with gears, wiring, and bits of what Carl really hoped were not irreplaceable museum exhibits. He approached the situation a little more cautiously this time, using his telekinesis to keep the constructs from ganging up on him and occasionally managing to punt one into the canal, where they would inevitably short-circuit and explode, and picking off others one at a time with his saber. He stopped thinking too much about it as well, allowing his inherited skills and reflexes to guide his attacks and avoid any attempts to catch him from behind. 

Carl was just finishing the last visible construct off when he heard someone clapping. He looked around and spotted a woman leaning against the corner of the museum, near the back alley where the loading doors were. Like him she was in costume, although he couldn't imagine how she didn't drop dead from heatstroke on the spot. It was the sort of thing he usually associated with the dress uniforms of elite European military units, harkening back in style to the late 1800s, or military dictators. She had a thick jacket with a double line of large silver buttons, epaulets with long, dense gold fringes, and more golden cords from her left shoulder to breast. It was pitch black, as were her pants, save for crimson trim. A peaked hat topped it all off. He'd have thought she was cosplaying a Warhammer commissar if it weren't for the lack of skull decorations. She also had some kind of black contacts in, and a museum gift shop bag.

"Ma'am, you really should get out of here," he called, jogging over. "I think there's more of those things inside, so you should head past the… police line…"

He trailed off as he realized that she didn't actually have contacts. Looking into her eyes was like staring up into the night sky; though black was the dominant color, scattered across it were countless stars, occasionally interrupted by a streaking meteor.

"Well done, very well done indeed," she said, extending her free hand. "You should be a little less reliant on your telekinesis trick, though. Gaatha Suevea, Excrucian Deceiver. Pleased to meet you."

"Carl," he said, shaking her hand cautiously. "Are you responsible for these things?"

"Yes, and the ones inside holding off your cohort, too."

"Cohort?" he said. "No, wait - why?"

"To get away with my loot, of course," Gaatha replied, hoisting her bag. The tip of what Carl really hoped was not a priceless cultural artifact was poking out the top. 'Priceless' was a relative term in this state, but still, it belonged in a museum. 

"Okay, but how'd you make them?" he asked, hoping to stall her until someone could arrive to help take her into custody.

"An enchantment, obviously." Suddenly she pulled him close and leaned in to look him in the eye, their noses almost touching. He jerked himself free and backed up several steps, leveling his lightsaber blade at her. She laughed at him and shook her head. 

"A Noble, here! How wonderful," she said. "We shouldn't be fighting, you and I. We're two of a kind, practically siblings in your material terms."

"That sounds very interesting," Carl said, "but maybe we can discuss it after you surrender."

Before she could reply, there was a crash behind them. A figure came flying out the windows around the main entrance, followed closely by a very angry-looking animated piano. There was a flash of red, white, and blue as the man repeatedly bashed it with a shield until it stopped moving.

"Holy shit, it's Captain America," Carl said. Sure, the uniform was decidedly worse for wear, but between it, the shield, and his distinctive figure it couldn't be anyone else. Then a whir of jet engines drew Carl's attention upward. "And the Falcon. It's Captain America and the Falcon. I think I'm going to have a fangasm."

"Ma'am," Cap said, striding over and looking so extraordinarily grumpy that Carl took a few extra steps away just to make sure he wasn't associated with her. "As I was trying to say earlier, you're under arrest."

"I think that's my cue to leave," Gaatha said. With a roar, a hovercraft came zooming down the canal and came to a sudden stop a few yards away. She pulled a screwdriver from her pocket - not a sonic one, just a regular Phillips-head - and waved it around in their general direction. "We'll talk later!"

There was a loud quasi-mechnical, quasi-electric noise, like the sound a Transformer made when doing its thing. Carl craned his neck to look behind him, fearing what he would see. A pair of tall trees were uprooting themselves, their bark transfigured into bronze armor and their leaves into sparking spear points. Further away, the cop cars were transforming as well. One flipped its doors out like wings, then buzzed off into the air like the world's most preposterous beetle. Three more Voltroned together into a two-story makeshift battlemech, armed with flamethrowers and tesla coils. 

"I can't believe this shit," Captain America muttered. 

Carl desperately wanted to ask Cap so many questions. First on the list was whether there were any Avengers around with actual superpowers. Cap was by far Best Avenger overall, but he was not exactly their heaviest hitter. Right about now Iron Patriot, Vision, or the Scarlet Witch would be really helpful. He'd even settle for Stark or Banner, as long as he could slap them afterward for the robot apocalypse. 

"You go right, I'll go left," the Captain said after a moment, pointing at the two electro-trees. Carl was both thrilled and terrified that he was apparently treating him as someone useful, as opposed a clueless moron pretending he was Kyle Katarn. No, scratch that - Kyle Katarn would have brought a gun along. 

Carl tried to get close to his tree, but it twirled its limbs at him like an arboreal blender. He narrowly managed to sever a few, even as they sliced up his costume and covered his arms with nicks and scrapes, but more just rotated into view. He had to jump backward and roll away to keep from getting his head shredded. 

Cap, meanwhile, did an effortless flip and flung his shield in among the branches of his target. It bounced around inside the canopy for a few seconds, knocking things together, and suddenly the entire thing shorted out with a huge electrical crack. It started to topple over and,  
seeing an opportunity, Carl used his telekinesis to give it a firm shove. It crashed into the other killer tree and a moment later both exploded in a shower of components, splinters, and hundred-dollar bills. 

"Hah! Suck it!" he shouted. He got a sudden feeling of danger a moment later, and turned just in time to see the mecha leveling some kind of arm cannons in their direction. Huge coils of wire inside them crackled and sparked, then flashed blinding white.

Cap somehow tucked himself into a little ball behind his shield and a bolt of lighting deflected off it. Carl, meanwhile, took one square in the chest and momentarily blacked out. He found himself sprawled out on the ground, his hair standing on edge, his costume reduced to little more than charred scraps, and much of his skin blackened and burned. He pushed himself up into a sitting position, both extremely pained and extremely pissed off, and considered what his options were for kicking the thing's ass. He was pretty sure that if he tried to throw it into the next state, he'd end up hurting himself even more, but it almost seemed worth it. 

The decision was taken from him when an Avengers quinjet decloaked behind the mech, and then started to unload on it with miniguns, rockets, and a laser cannon. It tried to turn around but had its legs shot out from under it. After a minute of fire the last pieces stopped twitching. 

"Sorry about the wait," a woman said over a loudspeaker. "I told you we parked too far away."

The enemy banished, Carl flopped back onto the ground. He was still sparking occasionally, but he couldn't even be properly worked up about the physical impossibility of that. He wasn't exactly tired, not physically and even not in powered terms, as he hadn't really expended much miraculous energy. Mentally, though, now that he had time to think the enormity of participating in even a small-scale superpowered skirmish was bearing down on him like a cement truck.

"Are you alright, sir?" Captain America said, his head appearing in Carl's field of vision. He'd taken off his helmet. "Natasha, tell Sam to get down here, we may need to medevac this guy."

"No, I'm fine," Carl said. "It's not as bad as it looks, see?" He tried brushing away some of the charred bits and ended up destroying what was left of his shirt. The skin of his chest was raw and pink, but the soot seemed mostly cosmetic. 

"Hmm. Well, I'd still feel better if our medic took a look at you, and it'd probably be best if we got you out of view before the press get here. You can be our guest. In fact, I insist."

Carl got the impression that, while well-intentioned, this might not be an entirely optional invitation. Also, a guest of the Avengers? Awesome. "Sounds good to me, sir." 

Cap reached down to give him a hand up, only to jerk back with a yelp when a static spark shocked him. 

"Sorry!" Carl said, clambering to his feet. "I think… I think I may have absorbed the electricity. Or something. I have no idea how this works, I didn't want to hurt myself badly enough to try out the damage system."

"Damage system," Cap repeated. He sighed. "Just get in the quinjet and don't touch anything."

Meekly Carl did as he was told. He found a seat in the rear compartment, well away from any exposed equipment or controls, and waited. He could hear some arguing outside, but after a couple minutes Cap and the Falcon came inside and the ramp lifted up. 

"Sam, this is Carl," Cap said. "Carl, Sam."

"Nice to meet you," Sam said. He was looking a little singed around the edges himself.

 

"It's an honor, sir, and I'm fine, really," Carl said, as Sam passed by him on the way to the cockpit. A moment later, a thought occurred to him. "Wait a second, how did you know - right. Steve. Okay, I'm an idiot."

"Don't be too hard on yourself," Steve said. "I was helped by a master of disguise."

Carl shook his head. He'd spoken with two Avengers and hadn't even realized it. "I suppose I should just be glad I didn't have time to gush too much."

"Trust me, there's nothing you could say that I haven't gotten in fan mail and interviews already," Steve said. "Do you mind asking a few questions?"

"Shoot."

"First off, is this your first round at the super-hero rodeo? No history of beating up criminals after dark?"

"No, I just happened to be there. If it had started ten minutes later, I wouldn't have even noticed," Carl said. It struck him as an odd coincidence, that. Was it fate or some kind of cosmic attraction that had drawn him and this Deceiver together? As he pondered that, he felt the quinjet take off, presumably moving to a more out-of-the-way location.

"Good, that'll make it a lot easier to square with the government," Steve said. "They don't mind helpful bystanders, but serial criminals can be a bit harder to sell."

"You're on your own with Disney, though." Standing at the door to the forward section was Natasha Romanoff, the infamous Black Widow, and Carl's third-favorite Avenger. "We fight supervillains, not copyright lawyers."

"It's a transformative work," Carl grumbled. "I guess you were here looking for her? Gaatha Suevea, that is."

Romanoff raised an eyebrow. "She told you her name?" 

"We spoke for a few minutes. She didn't really say much of substance, I think."

"That's more that we've got ourselves," Romanoff said. "Interesting that she stopped to chat."

"We've been tracking her for about a week now, after we were alerted to string of museum thefts with increasing signs of metahuman activity," Steve explained. "Based on her movements, the Vision managed to project she'd be in either Indianapolis or Nashville sometime this weekend, so we set up here and Colonel Rhodes took the rest of the team down south. We caught her in the act inside the State Museum, but then she unleashed those constructs on us."

"And she would have gotten away before we could get out of the building, if she hadn't paused to speak with you," Romanoff add. "Which makes me wonder why she did."

"Ah… I think she may be my nemesis," Carl said. "Or I'm hers? I'm not really sure."

"Nemesis," Steve repeated. 

Carl briefly sketched out his origin story: football injury, space snake, game-themed reality-warping powers, and possible world-destroying enemy. To their credit, the Avengers were able to keep straight faces. Maybe they had heard stranger things in the past. They had hung out with a different kind of space god before, after all.

"Could be worth following up on," was Romanoff's comment. 

"I'd be happy to help you any way I can," Carl said. "Find her, fight her, whatever, all you need to do is ask." He wouldn't dream of being so presumptuous as to imply that they could help him.

"Listen, just because some kind of… snake-god gave you superpowers doesn't mean you have to go out and fight anyone," Steve said. "And even if you want to, having powers doesn't necessarily come with the ability to use them effectively."

"I can use them just fine!" Carl protested. "I've got a package of fighting skills, and generalized mild competence!" Actually, now that he said it out loud, 'mild competence' didn't seem to be especially useful. 

"Just because you can swing a sword well doesn't mean you know when and why to use it, or how to support others," Steve pointed out. "For that matter, from what I saw, you mostly have just the one trick."

"I can learn to do more!"

Steve looked at Romanoff, who just shrugged. "Tell you what. While I handle cleanup with the police, Natasha will debrief you more thoroughly. We'll get back in touch with you in a few days, which should give you some time to think."

Carl wanted to argue a little more, but didn't, because (a) he was Captain America, and (b) he had kind of a point. Maybe if he'd had a bit more of a plan than cutting things up with a lightsaber he could have actually stopped Gaatha. For that matter, he might have been a bit more prepared to stop the mech. While he'd come out of that mostly intact, he was pretty sure that it wouldn't have taken much more for the thing to incapacitate him. 

"Don't worry," Romanoff said. "I don't bite. Why don't we start out with some background?"

"Shouldn't I have a secret… identity… yeah, okay, nevermind," Carl said, his sentence trailing off as Natasha simply raised an eyebrow as if to silently ask if he was serious. He started filling her in with more details about his educational and professional background, hobbies, and so on, still trying to refrain from spilling too many specifics about which university he worked at or where he lived. That worked for about five minutes, until she made a joke about the state of the football team and he came to the conclusion that trying to deceive the Black Widow could only end in humiliating failure. After that he answered every question to the best of his ability.

"Well, it's not the strangest story I've ever heard," Natasha eventually said, after walking him through the week preceding his empowerment for the third time, coaxing out every thing he did down to what he had for breakfast and how long he was stuck in construction traffic. "But it's close. You're absolutely certain you didn't touch anything strange or go too close to a nuclear reactor? Spill something from a biology lab on your meal?"

"I got nothing," Carl said. 

"Random act of alien god it is, then. So, you really want to be superhero?"

"I don't know. It seems like kind of a waste not to, but then, Cap kinda has a point, doesn't he?"

"He usually does, but he's also the last person who can tell someone to stay at home and mind their own business. Here's my advice. Go home, think of how else you can be useful, for the Avengers or just in general. Disaster relief, tech support, whatever fits your abilities and your mindset. Fighting's not the only skill the world needs."

"It seems kind of important if you randomly run into super-villains on your way to the zoo," Carl felt compelled to point out.

"I'm not saying a little training isn't in order, only that you don't need to be actively seeking out confrontations just because you think that's what powered individuals should do."

"Okay, yeah, I get it." Carl had gone this long without running around actively seeking trouble. A few days to thoroughly consider his options wouldn't hurt anything. Probably. In any case, if he wanted to impress Cap, he'd need some time to shine up his resume. "

"We have to do our own due diligence anyway," Natasha said. "You seem like a nice enough guy, but for all we know you could be some sort of serial criminal or a used car salesman or something."

Carl stared at her in disbelief. "Really? I mean, don't get me wrong, but…"

"But?" she said encouragingly. 

"You, Colonel Rhodes, and Sergeant Wilson are perfectly respectable people, but the rest of the team? Captain Rogers committed, like, twenty felonies trying to join the Army, Thor got kicked out of Asgard for being a jerk, the Hulk is the Hulk, Barton is a former carnie with a juvie record. Wanda Maximoff almost started the apocalypse, and the Vision is an AI built by Tony Stark, who also started the apocalypse."

"Why am I on the respectable list?" Natasha asked, as if he hadn't just called the Avengers a bunch of criminals.

He shrugged. "It always seemed kinda unfair to blame you for spying for your own country? I don't know enough to say otherwise."

She chuckled a little and shook her head. "It's nice of you to say that," she started.

"Also, I'm not stupid enough to insult the Black Widow to her face."

"Polite and practical, I like that. Come on, let's get you out of here."

Carl looked down at his charred clothes. "I don't suppose you have any spare pants, do you?"

A little bit later, while the press and everyone else were distracted by Captain America making some brief statements, Carl was hustled away while wearing Steve's backup sweatpants. Some tiny part of his mind thought that he really should have gotten them signed or something. Certainly it'd be something to gloat about the next time Lola1918 started getting uppity about the all-consuming maw that was his collection. Fortunately his common sense and good manners prevailed.

Needless to say, Carl was not sticking around the final day of the convention. He had to fight his way back to his hotel; apparently, it was the instinct of thousands of fans to flock toward the site of a supervillain attack instead of running away, at least if there was a chance to see three Avengers in person. A few minutes was all he needed to grab all his stuff, check out, and hit the road.

He promptly spent an hour stuck in traffic just trying to get out of the city.

His phone started to buzz incessantly before he even reached the on-ramp for the northbound interstate. Pretty much everyone he knew was aware he was in Indy, and so pretty much everyone he knew was now trying to text or call him. For several minutes he tried to post something reassuring to Facebook by shouting at Google Now, but every attempt came out so mangled anyone reading it would have thought he was dying. Finally, in what had to be one of the pettiest uses of his powers yet, he took advantage of his superhuman coordination to send out several posts, tweets, and texts without taking his eyes from the road. 

He was sore and tired by the time he got home, the physical affects of his battle starting to set in as he allowed his grip on his power to loosen and relax a little. He'd come out with nothing more than some bruises and a bone-deep ache, but it was still enough to remind him that while he wasn't mortal anymore, he certainly wasn't completely immortal either. He took a long, hot shower and downed most of a frozen pizza, then flopped onto the couch for a nap. 

Carl wasn't able to rest for long, though, before the crunch of gravel warned him of someone coming up the drive. He'd assured his parents that he would be over to tell them what he'd seen; it would be a highly edited report, needless to say. A glance out the window confirmed it was his friends.

"Come on in," Carl said, opening the door as they approached. 

"I'm going to skip any finger-wagging," Zara said, "to say that was the coolest thing I ever saw."

"Can you build me a lightsaber, too?" Ronan asked. 

"You got to actually talk to Captain America, right? Is he as adorably earnest in person as it seems like on TV?"

"Or what about a phaser?"

"And the Falcon! You remembered to ask him about the actuators on his wing suit, right?"

"Actually, how about just a sonic screwdriver?"

"Okay, okay!" Carl said. "One at a time! Yes, he is every bit as attractive in person and twice as charismatic. No, I did not have a chance to talk to the Falcon. And no, I don't think I can build any of that for you… probably."

"Well, that sucks," Ronan replied. 

"Do you think anyone else recognized me?"

Zara shrugged. "Not really, I haven't seen any good shots of your face, and you looked a little… different on screen. Buffer. You might want to take down any posts you made with pics of that cape, though."

"I don't think I put any up," Carl said. He barely used most social media himself, despite all his other computer activity, both to protect his privacy and because most of it was inane.

"That's good," Ronan said, "and not just because that supervillain or Hydra or someone might track you down. Disney made a press release, thanking you for being an enthusiastic fan but asking people to refrain from," he made air quotes, "'using Disney-related materials while conducting activities related to law enforcement, combat, or similar areas without permission.' Apparently they don't like the idea of Jedi-themed vigilantes."

"Hey, it's not like I'm running around New York punching minorities!" Carl protested. "She attacked me! And I helped Captain America!"

"These are the people who sue daycares for painting Pooh on the wall," Zara reminded him. "You're lucky they haven't hired the Winter Soldier to shoot your or something."

"Well, fine, they can be like that," Carl said. "I need a new outfit anyways, something a little more sturdy."

"You did look a little crispy," Ronan said. "Come on, you got to tell us everything."

Carl ran them through his perspective of the battle, then did it again after Ronan pulled up one of several videos available on the web. He was surprised at just how little time passed from the moment the first construct came out of the museum and the destruction of the mecha-scale ones. It had seemed much longer while he was in the thick of things.

"So are you going to keep working with us, or take up this superhero thing full-time?" Ronan eventually asked.

Carl shrugged and awkwardly scratched the back of his neck. "I don't know. I'm not sure it's my thing, and Steve - I mean, Captain Rogers - was kind of ambivalent too, since I don't exactly have many practical abilities. Ms. Romanoff gave me a pamphlet on their reserve program, though. And I do have a world-threatening nemesis, so I kinda have to fight at least her, right?"

"Well, let's just analyse the costs and opportunities," Zara said. "We can brainstorm some more creative uses for your weird miracle powers, too."

Carl lead the way out to his workshop and with a bit of effort he uncovered a large whiteboard on wheels, something he'd picked up at a university surplus sale for brainstorming purposes. He started drawing on the whiteboard to create two columns. "First off, pros and cons of superheroing. Go!"

"Pro: you get to hang out with the Avengers," Zara said. 

"Con: you may look like an idiot in front of Captain America," Ronan replied, while flipping through the recruitment pamphlet. "Pro: Excellent pay and benefits. No more scrounging for grants or trying to impress sociopathic venture capitalists."

"Con: you're going to need that medical insurance when some supervillain shoots you with a machine gun."

"I'm not sure about that, actually," Carl said, but he still wrote down 'machine gunned'. He was pretty sure that even if he survived it would hurt like fuck. 

"Pro: you might help save the world," Zara suggested. 

"Con: Steve Rogers finds out you wrote two hundred thousand words of slash about him after seeing the Matt Damon film."

"I was sixteen," Carl grumbled. "It's all vanished with rest of that old Stucky archive anyway."

"Yes," Zara said, "but what about your senior thesis about the Barnes diaries?"

"Oh shit," Carl said, dropping his marker. "Okay, don't panic, there's no way anyone's going to uncover - what am I say, the Black Widow is doing a background check on me, she's probably reading it right now. New topic: pros and cons of digging a deep bunker and never emerging again."

Ronan rolled his eyes. "Don't be such a drama queen. No one's going to care about a history paper that wasn't even all that original."

Embarrassment was immediately replaced by outrage. "Hey! I put a lot of research into that!"

"Leaving aside the amount of time your spent researching thirties New York," Zara said dryly, "is potential awkwardness really enough to stop you from working with the Avengers? In fact, are we just wasting our time?"

"Well, okay, no," Carl admitted. "I mean, mostly I don't want to give up the job I already have."

"I hate to break it to you, but at this rate we're all going to be looking for a new line of work by the end of the semester," Zara said. "Unless we can find a new lab space and the money to fund it, we're kind of screwed at the moment. At least the Avengers aren't going to run out of funding anytime soon."

"If you become a part-time Avenger, you can buddy up to Tony Stark and get piles of cash that way," Ronan suggested. "He totally owes us."

"Actually, since we're on the subject of money," Carl said, "I didn't mention this yet, but I kind of made about thirty grand today. The clockwork minions kept showering me with cash and it all got sucked into my wallet. I'm pretty sure things explode into money when I kill them."

"You have the weirdest superpowers ever," Ronan said after several moments. "I wonder what would happen if you broke into Pottery Barn and smashed everything up?"

"You are not breaking into a store and vandalizing it," Zara insisted firmly. "Tell him he's an idiot."

"Ronan, you're an idiot," Carl said. "I'm pretty sure Pottery Barn doesn't really sell any pottery, just overpriced decorations."

"I don't even want to think about the tax implications," Zara said. "If the universe showers you with money, does it count as income?"

"I'll figure it out later," Carl said. If the world was destroyed between then and April, it wouldn't matter either way, so concentrating on saving the world seemed like a higher priority. "Okay, you know, what, let's just plan for me to stay on and for us to get free of our university overlords. Between my miracles and your general brilliance, we should be able to turn out some kind of product that doesn't disappear in a poof of pixie dust when I stop powering it."

They spent some time brainstorming uses for his powers next. While being able to imbue objects with special abilities was certainly useful for variety, he could only do it with things he'd either hand-crafted or had some special connection with, and there were only so many he could handle at once. The same went for his enhanced skills; he could be omni-competent, but only for a brief span before he was back to his mundane abilities and a couple other game-based skills that seemed permanently on, like swordsmanship. Ultimately, if he was going to be fighting a supervillain, he needed to embrace the stranger enchantment-style power he possessed. 

Two weeks of experimentation and professional-grade munchkining later, Carl made a call to the number Natasha had given him and set up an appointment to visit Avenger headquarters.

"So what is it that you wanted to show me?" Steve asked. He and Carl were standing in a guest lab that had been temporarily assigned for his use. 

"Behold!" Carl said, making a sweeping gesture toward the black monolith sitting amid the various Stark-tech holographic displays. "The Acausal Computing Engine! Or Ace, for short. The proverbial computer powerful enough to run Crysis with the settings turned all the way up. At the moment it's just running an automated research system, which I think it can help solve our 'find the supervillain again' problem."

Carl sat down at the workstation and powered on the computer. After booting up the system, it said in a voice almost, but not quite entirely, identical to the Enterprise computer, "Good afternoon, Carl."

"Good afternoon, Ace," he replied. "This is Captain Rogers."

"A pleasure to meet you, sir."

"This isn't sapient, is it?" Steve asked. 

"Noooo, no no no," Carl hastily replied. "Not sapient at all. It probably has more computing power than anything else on the planet, but the personality is just a fancy language tree. There's no inward-directed data loop or anything like that."

"And there's absolutely no chance that it's going to 'accidentally' wake up or anything?"

"Trust me, we were very careful to make sure it can't self-generate any kind of needs or desires. It's purely focused on what the user wants."

"If you don't mind, I'd like to have Vision take a look at it sometime. I'm sure you did a good job, but these days it pays to double-check things."

"Hey, no problem," Carl said, holding up his hands in mock surrender. "I won't say no to having an expert give me some tips."

"Thanks," Steve said, with a smile that made Carl's heart go pitter-patter. "In the meantime, go ahead and explain how it works."

"Well, the search system I've devised basically processes information from every publically available feed out there. Facebook, Twitter, webcams, news media, police reports - if it's not behind a password, we can see it, and process it all for holistic analysis." Carl left out that, unlike the production versions, the prototype could do that because it literally had 'and then a miracle happens' as the middle point between data intake and result output. "It can be targeted to search for a specific person, or it can be tasked to find other sorts of patterns."

Steve's smile turned upside down. "Sound a little close to Insight for my tastes."

"It is similar, yes, but unlike Insight it doesn't actually recommend courses of action or provide any kind of profiling information. In fact, all but the most necessary data is obscured from the user and deleted once it's finished. Trust me, we put a lot of thought into privacy concerns." Carl shrugged. "In the end, though, it is public data, and the system is just a tool. It doesn't have any moral quality of its own, beyond what comes from how it's used."

"Some tools are a little easier to misuse than others," Steve pointed out. "Dynamite may be ethically neutral, but we control who can get some."

"If you want to sit down and discuss it in more detail, I'm open to that," Carl said, both hopeful and fearful that Steve might take him up on that offer. "Let me just do a quick demo for now. Something harmless… okay, I got it. Ace, who is the Howlie fan board member 'Lola1918'?"

"Commencing data acquisition," Ace announced. On the screen, fractal spirograph lines began to spin and twist, a little visual screensaver he'd added in just to give people something to look at. "Retrocausal search activated. Linguistic pattern locked in. Probability matrix generation in progress. Pruning irrelevant timelines. Redacting space bats."

"What does all that mean?" Steve asked. 

"Honestly? I'm pretty sure it's just making stuff up to keep us entertained. It's better than just sitting there humming ominously."

"Analysis complete," Ace said. "User 'Lola1918' is Phillip 'Phil' Coulson." A face appeared on the screen, some random middle-aged guy in a suit.

"Excuse me?" Steve said. 

"Who the hell is Phillip Coulson?" Carl asked. Immediately he realized it was kind of a stupid question; it wasn't as if he had any reason to know the man.

"Mr. Coulson is the Director of SHIELD."

"The director of what," Steve said, leaning over Carl's shoulder. 

"SHIELD is a vigilante intelligence organization, composed primarily of former agents of the official agency by the same name," Ace began. "There is is also a different outlaw organization by that name, composed of a different set of former SHIELD agents."

"Yes, thank you, computer," Steve said. He rubbed his temple like he had a sudden headache. "I'm starting to understand why Nick has trust issues. So you think this can track down Gaatha Suevea?"

"If there's some method or pattern to her actions, absolutely," Carl assured him. "If not, then she's bound to show up on someone's Instagram page sooner or later, and that'll give a location too."

"I suppose if your machine can do it, that'll let Vision focus on other problems," Steve said after thinking it over for a few seconds. "All right, we'll see what happens. Get the computer searching, then meet me out on the training field. I want to see what else you can do."

Trying not to act too much like an over-eager puppy, Carl said, "Sounds great to me! I've got some really sweet guns I brought along. And a rocket launcher. Also I've been practicing some parkour moves, I think you'll be impressed."

"That sounds like you've put a lot of effort into it," Steve said, in a way that came across as genuine despite the fact that he probably said it to every hair-brained scientist or superpowered hero wannabe who stopped by wanting to show off. 

"Ace," Carl said, "start searching for Gaatha Suevea's current location, or determine the time and place of her next heist or other nefarious activity."

"Initiating pattern recognition algorithms. Warning: miraculous obfuscation detected. Insufficient resources to guarantee timely success."

Carl frowned. He supposed it would have been way too easy to track her down with a metaphorical button press. He reached out to the connection between him and the machine and started pushing power through it. There was resistance to a degree he hadn't encountered before, until something suddenly gave way with a soundless pop. Ace's activity spiral swirled about for a moment, then froze.

"Analysis complete," Ace announced. "Based on previous activity, her next attack will be in downtown Chicago, tomorrow between ten and eleven a.m. local time."

"I don't know if that thing is incredibly useful," Steve said, staring at the monolith, "or terrifying."

"Why not both?" Carl said, suddenly thinking that maybe he needed to be extra sure about those privacy settings. 

Twenty or so hours did not seem like a lot of time to organize a battle plan, but apparently by Avengers standards it was a luxurious amount of warning. Once the Vision had double-checked the analysis and agreed that a pattern was obvious once it was pointed out - the Vision, double-checking Carl's work and finding it good! - Steve was able to come up with a strategy in a matter of minutes. Essentially the three members who could easily pass for civilians even when combat-ready, namely Carl, Natasha, and Wanda Maximoff, would stake out the three most likely museums Gaatha might hit, while Vision would monitor security at the rest. The remainder of the team would stand by to go in and capture her once she was located. That was the basic idea, anyway; the actual plan was much more complicated, and a lot of it went straight over Carl's head because it was based on maneuvers the Avengers had worked on perfecting long before. His main role was just to look out for the villain, keep her in sight if he saw her until the team arrived, and herd her away from civilians if possible. 

The Vision had noted that Gaatha seemed to be targeting historical artifacts, especially those associated with failures and defeats in some way: a Native American war axe from the Battle of Tippecanoe, the standard of one of the last rebellious daimyos, a soccer ball from some infamous last-second missed goal at a World Cup, and so forth. Why she was doing that was a mystery, but there were only so many museums in Chicago that might host something like that. 

Carl was stationed inside the Field Museum of Natural History, by the shore of Lake Michigan. He'd been there once before on a school trip, but that had been so long ago that it may as well never have happened. It was really a shame; he wished he had more time to actually look over the exhibits instead of trying to pretend he was while keeping an eye out. One of the little tricks he'd come up with was, essentially, a tracking radar-slash-minimap, but until he was sure it would actually show his prey he couldn't exactly rely on it. 

As the appointed hour came, he meandered through the halls and exhibits in what he hoped wasn't too conspicuous a manner. Occasionally he would stop and close his eyes to look about with his second sight, but he saw nothing with any unusual power, just the occasional glimmer in people's pockets where smart phones or handheld games rested. From the sound of things over the tiny radio stuck behind his ear, none of the other lookouts were having any more luck. 

Without warning the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. Carl whirled around, half expecting the Deceiver to be standing right behind him, but there were just a few tourists. Still, he felt like something was stirring in that direction, a whisper of motion just barely at the edge of hearing. He hurried that way, into the central hall that housed Sue the T-Rex, and arrived just in time to see Gaatha Sueva emerge from the rest of the dinosaur exhibition across the way.

It was hard to look at her. His eyes wanted slide away from her, and when he could get a straight-on view her clothing kept changing, one instant all-GAP and the next the full military uniform was back in place. She was also clutching what Carl really, really hoped was not the leg bone of a dinosaur. It almost certainly was one. 

"She's here," he said quietly, hoping not to draw attention to himself. Too late; her head snapped around with a snakelike suddenness. 

"So you're the one who's cyber-stalking me, eh?" Gaatha said as she walked in his direction. He met her halfway across the hall, a few feet in front of Sue. "Expanding your repertoire a little? Good for you."

"Can I ask you a question?" he said, stalling while the others moved to respond. "Why do you keep stealing things when there's a thousand other useful things you could do with your powers?"

"I always found these dinosaur creatures so interesting," Gaatha remarked, turning toward the T-Rex skeleton. "Did you know how they died? It was in the early years of the world, and one defecated near an angel. Za'afiel, the Angel of Destruction, was so angered that he smote the very Earth itself. I understand he was terribly sorry afterwards, but that didn't do much to help these poor fluffy creatures." 

At a loss for how to respond, Carl settled on pointing out the obvious. "The dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid impact."

"Were they? Perhaps. Or perhaps it was a battle between two Celestials for control over an Infinity Stone. Or it was a shift-ship that crashed and exploded. How can you know for sure what's true and what's not when they're all true, somewhere in this tangled mess you call a multiverse? That, my friend, is why I am stealing this velociraptor femur."

"So you really do want to collapse the universe?" Carl asked. "Why?"

"To save you all. Let me ask you this. Your idol, Mr. Rogers." Gaatha waved the femur vaguely west, about the right direction for where Steve's command post. "Did he meet his companion Bucky as a child and grow up with him? Or did they only meet during the war, and Bucky was still a young man? Has he lead the Avengers for one year, or for twenty, or forty? Or is he riding around on a red dinosaur searching for his lost love?"

"I'm going to guess all of the above," Carl said wearily. As convenient as it was for her to exposit away, he really wished the Avengers would hurry up and arrive.

"Exactly," she said, her smile as wide and toothy as a shark's. "How can we know what the true nature of Steve Rogers is if reality presents us with all possible Steve Rogers? What use is so-called history if it depends on your point of view?"

Carl shrugged. "That's always been one of the interesting questions springing from many-world theory, but it's not exactly relevant to anyone but philosophers. For us, our reality is the only one of consequence."

"Ah, that's where you're wrong. By collapsing reality into a single unified timeline, free will shall have meaning again! I propose not to destroy your world, but to save it from itself!" Gaatha struck a dramatic pose, arm extended upward, and for a few seconds the universe obliged her with a spotlight from somewhere above.

"What happens to people who don't exist in every timeline?" Carl asked. 

"I don't know. Let's see what happens."

"Nope," Carl said, shaking his head. "Nope, nope. That was a vaguely interesting position until it involved erasing people from existence. How about you just surrender now? The Avengers are literally seconds away, and I don't think you have the power to make enough constructs to hold them all off."

"No, I'm still quite weakened from having to reform myself in this low-magic environment," Gaatha admitted. "That's why I spent all night making an army and unleashed it two minutes ago."

"What."

"And now, I shall make my escape from you. I have a date with destiny." Gaatha drew her screwdriver from her uniform and looked up at Sue. 

"Oh, hell, no," Carl said. "That is a priceless historical artifact. You are not turning it into some clockwork monstrosity."

"History," Gaatha replied, "is a lie."

Before she could do anything horrible, Carl reached for his belt and drew another of his new toys: the Ban Hammer. While it appeared to be an everyday rubber mallet, it had already proven invaluable for scourging trolls from some of his favorite websites. Now, with a wave he banned Gaatha from the museum. She was yanked backward by an invisible force, crashing through the exit doors at the far end of the hall. Carl sprinted after her, changing his choice of wardrobe as he did. His t-shirt and jeans vanished, replaced a moment later by a new costume. It was proper armor this time, modeled on his favorite version of the N-7 suit although lacking any intellectual property markings this time, and unlike the cloth-and-plastic cosplay outfit this one was forged from metal and wish-born composites. It also had a helmet with a convenient privacy-protecting visor. 

"Okay, she's out on the east parking lot now," Carl shouted. "I'm in pursuit."

"Roger that," Steve replied. "We're headed your way, but we're encountering resistance. Be advised that Iron Patriot reports unusual movement near the shore."

Exiting the building, Carl looked around for his prey and spotted her just as she hopped onto some kind of mechanical ostrich. She waved jauntily and then took off at a good thirty or forty miles per hour, heading north. He ran after her, burning energy to keep up with her. They almost immediately reached the eight-lane Lakeshore Drive just to the west of the museum. What had been mildly heavy but fast-moving traffic when he entered the building was now a solid traffic jam. The reason why quickly became apparent. Various sorts of spindly constructs were emerging from alleys, overpasses, and manholes. Ahead he also saw a gigantic brass octopus battering its way free of a marina. It was shooting lasers from its eyes. "Resistance" indeed. 

The long parking lot of cars the highway had turned into proved surprisingly little obstacle. Gaatha swooped through the gaps between them more nimbly than even the most daring motorcyclist. Carl just went right over the cars and trucks entirely, parkouring from roof to roof with such ease he may have well been jogging on a paved track. 

The minions were a different story, though. Overhead Falcon and Iron Patriot were dogfighting with dozens of flyers, but Carl still had to keep an eye out for any they missed, occasionally ducking past as they divebombed him. Others sprang up in Gaatha's wake, lamp posts, cars, and other random objects transforming and throwing themselves at him. Dealing with one or two wouldn't have been a problem; dealing with a constant stream of them was another thing entirely. Some he could dodge or jump over entirely, leaving them behind for someone else to deal with, and some he could telekinetically shove out of the way. He couldn't do both of those and keep a tracker lock on Gaatha to make sure she didn't illusion her way out of his sight, and deflect lightning bolts, and gently reposition the occasional terrified commuter. Every time Carl had to take his mind off the chase, he slipped a little further behind, and yet every time he didn't he risked a collision or close encounter with a flamethrower that would end the run entirely. 

"Guys, I'm headed north on Lakeshore and need some help," Carl called. He could hear the other Avengers on the radio, and none of them seemed like they were in any position to help. The only one he could even see other the flyers was the Vision, and he appeared to be locked in hand-to-tentacle combat at the actual lake shore. He somersaulted over a Volvo, landed on asphalt to roll under a semi trailer, and suddenly came face to face with a construct created from a few dozen bicycles. It spread out in every direction like a peacock, wheels and chains whirring menacingly. 

Then its head exploded. 

Carl narrowly managed to leap over it as it toppled over, crushing some poor Smart car's roof as he landed on it. He tried to spot who'd taken that shot, but no one was in sight. Another construct went down moments later. Soon it became apparent that a sniper in one of the lakeside skyscrapers was clearing a path for him. 

Carl ran for miles, crossing the distance faster on foot than could have been done by car at that time of day even when downtown wasn't an active battle zone. He almost went too far; despite his best efforts he'd fallen well behind Gaatha and didn't notice immediately when she turned west. He skidded around a corner just as she went round another one blocks away, but looking at his maps he suddenly realized what her destination might be. His suspicions were confirmed when he came to a panting halt in front of fabled Wrigley Field. 

The gates to the park's various entrances had been replaced by massive armored doors. Carl stared up at them, wondering how he'd get through. The lightsaber might work at cutting off the hinges or locks, but it seemed like it would take too long. Fortunately, he had come up with something just right for this situation. He drew from his belt the Master Key, which could open any lock that is, was, or will be. He placed it against the doors and, with a little "da-da-daa-DAAAAH!" noise they swung open. 

Carl carefully made his way through the deserted halls until he emerged on the field itself. He arrived just Gaatha was placing the raptor bone into a semi-sized contraption on the pitcher's mound. It looked like the cross between a mad clockmaker's magnum opus and a satellite dish, with various stolen artifacts positioned in glass globes here and there. 

"Let me guess," Carl called out, pulling his lightsaber from his belt. "That's your superweapon to destroy the universe?"

"Save the universe," Gaatha said, fiddling with dials and levers, "and no. It's actually a beacon. It will feed on the millions of crushed dreams that have built up in this stadium and call forth more of my compatriots. You won't stand a chance once our full strength is arrayed against you."

"Maybe, but I'll stop you before you can finish."

"Will you?" Gaatha turned and drew a sword with a flourish. Like her eyes, its blade wasn't just black but rather a window into the void, fringed in shadow. "Let us see, then."

In Carl's head, "Duel of the Fates" started to play. He swallowed and ignited his saber.

Carl had put a lot of thought and effort into his swordsmanship, not wanting to rely purely on miraculous autopilot. He took full advantage of his light blade and superhuman reflexes to develop a fast but minimalist style that moved the blade just enough to block an attack or make one of his own, without a lot of flashy extraneous twirls. He mostly held his saber one-handed in a fencing-inspired style, and made sure to keep moving so he wasn't an easy target for anyone aiming a gun his way. It was, in his opinion, an elegant style for a decidedly uncivilized age. 

Gaatha clearly took the opposite approach. 

If Carl floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee, Gaatha barged like a bulldoze and carved like a chainsaw. She had access to the same sort of miraculous speed and strength he could call upon, but turned them to different ends. Every swing of her longsword was telegraphed in advance, but that proved little help. He could either move out of the way or block with his full strength, but attempts to deflect her blade with a deft tap of his own may as well have been directed at a freight train. All his expert maneuvers and cunning misdirections were bludgeoned aside by a combination of paramount strength and sheer bloody-mindedness.

Carl decided to disengage and try a different tactic. He backflipped a dozen yards to give himself some room to maneuver, then thrust his hand open-palmed toward Gaatha, willing her to fly backward and crash into her doomsday device. In reply she thrust her sword toward him point-first. She failed to go flying. 

"I told you not to rely on that," Gaatha said, shaking her hand. "I won this soul-carving sword off a warmain in a bet. It can suppress a miraculous attack for as long as I keep it active. Neat trick, isn't it?"

Just to make sure she wasn't lying, Carl tried to pick up a backstop fence and hurl it at her as an impromptu cage. Still nothing happened.

"Well, shit," Carl said. Okay, he thought to himself, don't panic, you have other ideas. 

He didn't want to find out whether he could directly enchant her, not when it was entirely possible she could deflect or twist that to her own advantage. Time to give a physical miracle a chance; he summoned minions into existence. A dozen blocky green creatures materialized around him and he pointed them toward Gaatha. 

"Hssssssss," they cried, galumphing toward the deceiver on stubby legs. Carl charged in close behind. Wide-eyed, Gaatha stumbled back, swinging her blade to and fro. She cut down all but one of the creepers, but that one got close enough to expand and then explode with a deafening bang. Gaatha was throw dozens of feet through the air and slammed against one of the side walls of the field. Carl was there a moment later, and with a single flick of his saber he severed her sword hand and sent her soul-carving blade flying. 

"You know," he said, starting grin, "you shouldn't rely too much on one trick. Feel like surrendering yet?"

Carl had forgotten Rule Number Six: "I will not gloat over my enemies' predicament before killing them." Gaatha aptly demonstrating this by suddenly growing a T-1000 blade in place of her missing hand and grabbing his collar with the other. With a single move she swung him around and nailed him to the wall. 

He looked down at the blade protruding from his chest, right about where his heart was. There wasn't any pain, either, probably because it went through his spine as well, but his HUD was blazing with alarms. This wasn't possible, he thought, gaping like a fish. He was the hero, he couldn't just be stabbed! 

"Hey!" someone shouted. "Leave him alone!" 

Gaatha withdrew her arm-blade and turned to face Captain America. Carl slumped down to the ground, mouth gaping like a fish."Don't worry," she said, "he's not dead. I'm not going to kill my only peer in this silly multiverse. You, on the other hand, are decidedly expendable."

Oh, hell, no. Carl was not going to let her kill Steve Rogers. Fortunately for him, his subconscious was doing something a bit more productive than the panicked witterings of his conscious mind. His powers turned inward and twisted the wound into a new form. He was a video game character - he wasn't so foolish as to keep vital organs inside his body! Impalement would damage but by no means disable. His skin turned a less natural shade and became a bit rigid, his hair became blockier and jagged, and those pesky fears were replaced with a cool detachment. 

"Employing incineration tactic," Carl gurgled, quipping with all the renegade heartless of a murder-hobo steered by a bored teenager. He pulled a fresh-cut rose from his belt and unleashed an eye-searing column of pixelated napalm. 

Gaatha was turning back his way and caught the fire full in the chest. She flailed about screaming for several seconds before collapsing into a heap in center field. The screaming kept going even after she stopped moving. 

"Lol, get rekt," Carl said, immediately horrified with himself. No, no, no, heart ripped out or not, he was not going to turn into some kind of gamer bro troll. He looked up at Steve. 

"How's it going out there with the minions?"

"We've corralled them back to the shoreline and the team's mopping up what's left," Steve replied, staring at him. "Are you okay?"

"Oh, sure, I've never been better. Nothing like a barbeque to - sorry, I seem to have given myself some kind of Tourette's, please ignore anything I… say…" Carl trailed off as he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. 

The screaming had not stopped, but instead had morphed into something closer to the wail of a tea kettle. It trailed off as Gaatha got to her feet again. She wasn't much more than a charred skeleton with bits of uniform hanging off her. That started to change quickly, as Carl felt an enormous tidal wave of power flowing into and around Gaatha. A metal framework assembled around her skeleton, and onto that framework more was built. Gears, pistons, hydraulic lines, and armor plating; Tesla coils, machine guns, and massive scissor-claws. Within seconds she had grown into a twenty-foot mechanical monstrosity. 

"All right," Gaatha thundered, voice metallic and buzzing with reverb, "no more Miss Nice Deceiver!" She leveled a gatling flechette cannon at Carl and Steve. It began to spin while humming ominously.

"Fuck me," Steve said. 

They barely had time to leap away before a shower of foot-long steel rods shot past them. The two of them run up into the stands, going opposite directions to split her fire. Steve bounced his shield off Gaatha's steel-encased head. Carl pulled out an automatic rifle and pelted her with bullets. Neither had any visible effect; between her armor and the fact that all the fleshy bits had already been burnt away, hurting her was problematic. 

Well, if years of roleplaying had taught Carl anything, it was that being a blaster wizard wasn't very efficient anyway. Battlefield control was where real power lay. With that in mind, he turned his attention to his surroundings, gathered every last bit of free power he had, and unleashed a greater enchantment aimed not at his enemy but at the entirety Wrigley Field itself. For a moment, time slowed to a crawl as local reality hit the pause button while it reconfigured itself. The air around the outfield shimmered and solidified into an invisible barrier to make sure Gaatha could not flee, even as the entire stadium warped and expanded to create more room inside despite the constraints of its exterior dimensions. The rows in the stand grew taller and wider, leaving enough space to easily run freely, while the chairs morphed into chest-high barriers to provide plenty of cover. Platforms jutted out into the air, spaced for easy jumping. 

Underlying the gross physical changes were subtler metaphysical ones. Local causality was warped and given a natural teleological endpoint that events would slip toward. There was a defined path to victory, tricky though it might be to negotiate. This was no longer just a slugfest between superhuman entities; it was a boss battle. 

It was also vandalism of a historic location on a grand scale, but at that point Carl wouldn't have cared even if he still had a heart. 

Time resumed its normal course. Showers of tracer fire still arced toward Carl and Steve, but dodging was now simple to the point a chubby eight-year-old could do it. Not only was there plenty of room to run and jump, but even the flimsiest-seeming objects like flags and fences proved to be impenetrable barriers against gunfire. 

"Hold still so I can kill you!" Gaatha shouted up at them. She tried to climb up into the stands with them, but as it turned out, having giant scissors for hands was not conducive to gripping surfaces. While she struggled to pull herself up without cutting through her handholds, Iron Patriot came swooping in low behind her. He landed, braced himself against the ground, and let loose with a volley of fire from his shoulder cannon and repulsors. His attack caught her right in the shoulder joint and severed her left arm.

"You fools think that will stop me?" Gaatha cried, turning around and trying to blast Iron Patriot with the cannon mounted on her remaining arm. He dodged back up into the air. "You have not even seen… my final form!"

She grew several more feet while thick layers of armor scales and spikes extruded to cover her body. Another arm regrew to replace the one she'd just lost, and then for good measure a third one also sprang from that joint, this one ending with a rotary saw. 

"Wait, since when do I have a final form?" Gaatha said.

Before she could think of that further, Carl cannonballed off a platform, goomba-stomped her head, and bounced right back into cover. There was a flicker of shadow as something passed overhead. Carl looked up just in time to see Falcon airdrop the Black Widow into the upper stands. He briefly wondered what good she could do, given that this was not exactly a situation where adding more electricity could help, but then she unslung a grenade launcher from her back. He really should have known better than to doubt her. Pop, pop, pop, pop, she unloaded her magazine into Gaatha's back. The deceiver turned and with a roar let loose a volley of rockets from her shoulder-mounted missile rack. The Scarlet Witch appeared beside the Widow and the projectiles ricocheted off a misty red barrier, while Natasha calmly reloaded with a different set of grenades. This time instead of simply exploding on impact, they released a thick spray of sticky goo. It trickled down into the joints of Gaatha's armor, then solidified. Soon she was limping about while cursing even more loudly.

With most of the Avengers now on site, it seemed inevitable that the deceiver should go down, but it was still proving difficult. Every time it seemed she might be defeated, her armor would pop off and a new layer would slide into place. This was not, however, entirely unexpected to Carl, and after a few rounds he spotted a pattern he'd suspected might show up.

"Cap! Hey, Cap, over here!" Carl called, waving frantically to attract his attention and then ducking behind a pillar to hide from a storm of shurikens. 

Steve platformed his way halfway around the stadium to crouch behind a nearby chest-high wall. "You have a radio, remember?" he said, shouting to be heard over the constant din of various automatic weapons, lasers, and explosives going off. 

"Whoops. Sorry."

"Don't worry about it. What do you need?"

"You see how her chest plating is open and exposed every time she sheds her skin?" Carl asked. "The next time she does that, I need you to jam it open with your shield."

"Okay, got it."

"Really?" Carl was surprised that Steve would just accept an order from some random moron with superpowers. "Don't you need to know why?"

"If I asked why every time this sort of thing happens, I'd never get anything done. I just assume my people know what they're doing until proven otherwise."

"Oh. Well, thanks for the vote of confidence." Carl switched over to his rocket launcher and waited to see if he was about to make a complete fool of both himself and Captain America. Possibly on live TV, given there were several news choppers hovering overhead now that the flying constructs were gone.

It took a few minutes, but finally there was a loud cracking noise as an armor layer fell off Gaatha. Just as new chest plating emerged, Steve threw his mighty shield, timing it perfectly so that it propped open two converging plates. Behind them, there was a watermelon-sized red orb that pulsated with a sickly inner glow. Carl got down on one knee, took careful aim, and fired. His rocket arrived just as Gaatha was reaching to remove the shield, passing mere inches from her hand and obstructions to strike true against that central core. 

There was a loud series of rumbles, and with a fireball Gaatha's armor exploded. A skeletal inner frame was left, but with the bulk of it removed all it took was a repulsor blast from Iron Patriot and a wave of scarlet energy to blast the last remnants to pieces. 

Something hit the wall beside Carl with a thunk. It took him a moment to realize it was Gaatha's head. It was surprisingly intact, all things considered, with glowing red eyes that glared at him. 

"You think you've won, do you?" the skull said, without moving its fused jaw. 

Carl picked it up in the classic Hamlet pose. "You've been blown into a million pieces, and if that's not enough, I'm going to chuck what's left into big vat of metal or something."

Gaatha laughed hollowly. "I only wanted to save you all. The others have less kind intentions."

"Others? Don't tell me there's more of you."

"There are… four models… of Excrucian." The lights in the skull went out as Carl felt the last embers of power fade away. As if to dispel any last lingering doubts, Zelda victory music started to play and his wallet grew three sizes. 

The entire battle, from museum to final boss explosion, had taken maybe an hour. That time was, Carl soon realized, dwarfed by the clean-up afterwards. After carefully extracting all the historic artifacts from the doomsday machine, he melted the entire thing and what was left of the mecha into a heap of scrap to make sure no government or corporate morons accidentally summoned the hordes of the Not down upon the world. Restoring Wrigley Field to its natural state proved to be impossible with the dregs of power he had left; it would have to wait until he could recharge. Part of him didn't even want to fix it. Maybe if it stayed a land of narrative causality the Cubs would finally win a World Series. 

Outside, the remaining constructs had collapsed into heaps of ordinary junk with Gaatha's death, but the damage they had done remained. Carl spent a few hours sealing holes in walls with temporary patches and clearing wrecked cars from the streets, until finally Steve called it a day and handed things over to the local authorities. As soon as he reached a room set aside for them at a nearby fire station, Carl finally let himself collapse from exhaustion onto the nearest couch. 

An indeterminate time later, Steve sat down in a chair next to him. "So, how'd you like your first day as a superhero?"

"I got a sword shoved through my heart," Carl replied. "I think for me, superheroing is definitely a part-time job. I'll keep an eye out locally, but otherwise call me again if a giant wolf tries to eat the moon."

Steve chuckled. "I'll keep that in mind. For now, there's one last thing we need to do before heading home: introducing you to the reporters camped outside."

Carl groaned and covered his eyes with his arm. "Can't I just summon Alduin and feed them to him?"

"A free press is a vital part of democracy," Steve lectured, "and 'free' includes not being fed to dragons."

"Well, if you say so," Carl said. He frowned as thought occurred to him. "Wait a second, how do-."

"Also," Steve continued, "if we don't give them any information, they're just going to make stuff up about you, so we're better off giving them something to work with. It'll take five minutes, tops. Have you chosen a call sign yet?"

"Maybe… White Knight? No, that sounds like a concern troll. GM? Sovereign? This really isn't my area of expertise."

"On second thought," Steve said, "just stand next to me, smile, and nod. The details can wait for a press packet."

"Sounds like a plan." Carl stood up, tried to make sure his scored and scorched armor looked as presentable as it could under the circumstances, and squared his shoulders. "Lay on, MacDuff."

Off they went to greet the public. In the back of his mind, Carl was already planning what came next. Bootstrapping new, industrially-replicable technology with his powers would be the key to improving the world on an everyday scale; there wasn't that much need for a superhero in his neck of the woods. Gaatha's parting words nagged at him, though. Perhaps she was just messing with his mind, but he'd be surprised if there weren't others like her lurking somewhere. For all the trouble she'd caused, it had all gone down too easily. A starter-level boss, so to speak. If another popped up, with more time to prepare, they'd be an entirely different kind of challenge.

All that would have to wait, though, until after he got home and had a nap. Lunch and a nap. A shower, lunch, and a nap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to DizzyRedHead for the [wonderful title image and dividers!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5157161) You did great work with a wacky concept. Also thanks to my usual betas for their help.


	2. Post-Credits Scene

"Skye! Skye, get in here!"

Daisy poked her head into Coulson's office. "What's up?"

"What's wrong with my computer?" he said, gesturing to the Howling Commandos site he had up.

Daisy peered over his shoulder, then shrugged. "It says you're banned. Have you been flaming the FBI again?."

"I can't be banned," Coulson protested. "I'm the administrator, it's my site!"

She squeezed around him to make a few keystrokes. "No, look, here's a message. 'Banned for faking his own death and lying to Captain America about it. By order of Carl, First of His Name, King of the Consoles, the Mobiles, and the PCs, Lord of All Gamers and Protector of the Net.' It looks like you pissed off the wrong hacker."

"I never lied to Captain America," Coulson said, affronted by the idea. Seeing Daisy's skeptical look, he added, "That was Fury, not me."

Daisy spread her hands. "I think you're on your own with this one."


	3. Character Sheet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is totally irrelevant to the actual story but is what I used to keep myself in check, mostly because a couple of useful Chuubo's arcs had not come out yet.

Carl Hasser, Dominus Luda Visiorum (Knight-Exemplar of Video Games)  
Aspect 0, Domain 0, Persona 3, Treasure 4  
Skills: DIY Tech 2, Informatics 3, Programming 2, Superior Swordsman 2, Superior Soldier 2, Cool 1  
Passion: Captain America 1  
Treasures: Lightsaber, Master Key, Wardrobe, Banhammer, Mini-Map, FPS Armory, Smartphone, Search Engine  
Gifts: Extra Skills, Durant, Telekinesis, Parkour! 

Video Games…  
… abstract objects and entities.  
… entertain and challenge.  
… are interactive and responsive.   
… provide a path to success.  
… exist in virtual realms.

* * *

**Bondflictions**

Affliction: I have an appropriate soundtrack for the moment. (1)   
Affliction: My rampant looting must go unnoticed. (2)  
Affliction: I must sense danger coming. (1)  
Affliction: Money and items spring from my defeated opponents. (1) 

Bond: I always know where I am and where I'm going. (1) Treasure: Mini-Map  
Bond: I can open any lock that is, was, or will be. (1) Treasure: Master Key  
Bond: My lightsaber can cut anything. (3) Treasure: Lightsaber  
Bond: I have superior firepower. (2) Treasure: FPS Armory  
Bond: I suffer not the troll to live. (1) Treasure: Banhammer  
Bond: My clothes are appropriate for any situation. (1) Treasure: Miraculous Wardrobe  
Bond: The ultimate search engine finds what I'm looking for. (1) Treasure: Acausal Computing Engine  
Bond: I'm always connected. (1) Treasure: Laptop & Smartphone  
Bond: We can do this if we work together. (1)


End file.
